A project of the Public Learning Media Laboratory

Website: http://www.boolify.org

Overview: This lesson will help teach students basic Boolean.

Purpose: It is important that educators teach students about the use

of Boolean to refine web searches.

Objectives: Students will learn about the different Boolean operators:

“and”, “or” and “not”. Students will model the operators, and then
translation their modeling into a visual search engine (Boolify).

Activities:

• Spend several minutes describing to Boolean to students,

including “and”, “or” and “not.

• Model the difference between Boolean operators by asking:

o AND
 All students wearing blue jeans to stand up
 All students wearing blue jeans AND who are girls to
stand up
 All students wearing blue jeans AND who are girls
AND with a name that starts with “A” to stand up
o OR
 All students wearing blue jeans OR t-shirts to stand
up
 All students wearing blue jeans AND t-shirts OR caps
to stand up
o NOT
 All students wearing t-shirts but NOT jeans, stand up
 All students who are boys and NOT wearing sandals,
stand up

• Have the students reflect on the combinations. Can they make

up a new combination, so that only a desired person stands up?

• Then, jump to the website, Boolify. Describe that a search engine

works the same way.

o For instance, if you want to find all web pages with

 A project of the Public Learning Media Laboratory

“dolphins”, you can search for just “dolphin”

o But, that also brings up things about Football. How would
you eliminate those results, with NOT?

Further ideas:

• Have the students work in pairs to pick a favorite topic, and then
search for things related to that topic. One student should
propose keywords, and the other, to help choose Boolean to
further limit the search results.

• Have students tell you their research topic (if applicable) and
explore their thoughts about how to create a search that will get
them detailed, relevant information.

Wrapping up:

• Spend several minutes discussing how this work relates to their

research class work.

• Have students teach back to others (on a projector, if available)

the use of AND, OR and NOT. Have students model Boolean on
the web, using the number of results to explain how they limited
or widened their query.