A Geocaching Game “Meet Your Editor” as a Teaser for Writing Courses

The absence of academic writing instruction and the ever-growing requirements for Czech doctoral students to publish in prestigious journals English have created a gap between the doctoral students’ skills and the requirements they need to comply with. In this paper, we briefly summarize the results of a needs analysis survey we had administered to doctoral students at a Czech engineering university prior to developing academic writing and information literacy courses for these students. But for these courses to catch on, we need to disseminate knowledge about writing development and pedagogies to audiences and higher education stakeholders who are largely unaware that writing can be taught because writing development and composition studies are not culturally embedded in the Czech education system. To draw attention to the courses and highlight their importance and appeal, we opted for a geocaching/ educaching game and show writing as a process, where students move through different stages on their journey to publication. The game thus creates situations, sending the players to different places along the way, including the library, journal editor’s office, or a conference.