RootsTech2020 Follow Up - Innovations from BYU Tech Lab Part II

Yesterday I wrote about some of the BYU Tech Labs productivity tools. Today I will present some of the fun activities they have been working on. Again, some of these have been around for a while, but some are new and still in development.

Geneopardy is a fun family game based on the concept of a well known similarly named TV game show. The game tests your knowledge of your ancestors with questions from categories such as dates, places, people, facts, and other. Each category has 5 levels of difficulty worth between 100 and 500 points. You can select the number of generations to get questions from and have up to 4 teams playing against each other or do it singularly just to test your own knowledge.

The concept behind Wheel of Family Fortune is similar to another well known TV game show. The game board includes a question about an ancestor, such as "This ancestor was born in 1866", and the blanks to fill in with letters that you choose. Up to four people can play this game, spinning the wheel and selecting letters to maximize their dollar amount.

Ancestor Games includes a variety of simple activities that you can do with your children. The games include the following:

• Matching Game where you have cards with your ancestors' photos which you have to match,
• Ancestor Coloring where you have a photo that has been turned into an outline and you can color it in on the computer or print it out to color,
• Crossword Puzzles based on your ancestors' information,
• Word Search puzzles with information about your ancestors, and
• Word Scramble puzzles with your ancestors' names.

Record Quest is a simple adventure game where your character has to find family history in an interactive way.

Geneography gives you the ability to visualize statistics from the various US Census records. This tool lets you explore various statistics such as marriage age, number of children, and death age in each state. It also provides discussions of major events such as the Civil War and World War II and how these events impacted the statistics.

Reverse Indexing is a new tool that uses handwriting recognition technology to increase the speed at which indexing takes place. You can select the name you want to index and the computer will display up to 12 occurrences of that name. It is your task to read through these suggestions and determine if any of them are incorrect. By selecting the incorrect names, the computer is being taught how to make better selections.

Memri is a beta product being designed as a social networking platform where you and your family can share memories of your lifetime. It can find memories from your FamilySearch account and include those in the Memri pages. You can select what is private and public from your page. 

The Alexa app is currently under development. It is intended to interact with the other BYU Labs products through your Alexa device.

Each of these products is designed to increase participation in family history by making it fun and easy by playing games and completing tasks. Try them out during your next family home evening or other family event and make family history fun.