I am the copyright lead at Lanchester Library, Coventry University. My team specialises in embedding Open Educational Resources in teaching at the university. I advise and train colleagues on copyright and licences. Since copyright still seems like a dreary topic for most colleagues, I set myself a mission to develop online educational games.
When Halloween decorations appear in shops before we have quite accepted that summer is over, and Christmas merchandise follows closely behind, my thoughts inevitably turn to how to bring copyright into it. Perhaps that is an occupational hazard?
But there is a serious idea behind it. Over the years, I have become increasingly interested in how we can make copyright education feel less daunting and more inviting. Copyright is important, but that doesn’t mean learning about it always has to involve lengthy guidance, formal training, or lots of text. Sometimes a quiz, a game or a slightly silly seasonal scenario can start a conversation just as effectively.
Certain times of year also give us a ready-made excuse to try something different. I like to latch onto calendar events, really.
Why make copyright seasonal?
Those of us involved in copyright education will probably recognise the challenge of competing for people’s attention. Colleagues are busy, and copyright is rarely the first thing on their to-do list. Even people who know copyright matters may approach it with caution or anxiety.
My response has increasingly been to look for opportunities to bring copyright to people rather than wait for them to come looking for it.
Seasonal events can be particularly useful for that. Halloween, Open Access Week and Christmas all provide opportunities to share something short, topical and hopefully fun. A small activity landing in someone’s inbox or appearing on an internal communication channel can introduce a copyright concept without asking them to commit to a training session.
This also gives us, as copyright educators, permission to be playful.
I have found December particularly good for this sort of light-touch engagement. As we approach the end of the year, colleagues are often more willing to let their hair down and engage with mini games and activities. So, this year, I decided to take the idea a little further.
24 doors and quite a lot of copyright
My new experiment for 2026 is a Copyright Advent Calendar.
Rather than chocolate behind each door, the calendar offers a series of short copyright and licensing games and challenges throughout December. Admittedly, chocolate might be more immediately attractive, but I am hoping copyright can compete.
The idea is simple: instead of copyright education being a single event, learners can encounter it in small, manageable pieces, gathering digital Christmas decorations along the way, all captured in a snow globe. Who doesn’t like a snow globe? The seasonal format provides the invitation, while the individual activities provide opportunities to explore and test copyright knowledge.
👉 Try the Copyright Advent Calendar
This is also an experiment in making copyright learning something that people might want to click on. The activities are deliberately short and informal. You can do one and leave, come back another day, or explore several.
To be inclusive, I have included notes on other religious or non-religious occurrences in December.
For me, that is an important part of copyright literacy. We do not necessarily need everyone to become a copyright expert. We want people to feel more confident recognising copyright questions, making informed decisions, and knowing when they might need further help.
Feel free to include it in your seasonal comms!
Halloween can have copyright too 🎃
The Advent Calendar is not my first attempt at seasonal copyright.
I previously created a Halloween copyright activity. Colleagues can play it individually, or it can become a team effort, a competition to see which breakout room escapes the zombies first.
I particularly like the team’s approach because the discussion around an answer can sometimes be more valuable than getting the answer “right”. Copyright is full of situations where context matters and talking through them encourages people to articulate what they think and why.
This year we also have a useful conjunction in the calendar: International Open Access Week takes place from 19 to 25 October, just before Halloween. That gives me an opportunity to extend the seasonal theme into a week of short activities around openness, reuse and licensing.
I am planning to circulate a different resource each day, including:
- Introduction to Creative Commons Licenses (this one was created by Claire Sewell and Amy Theobald)
- How do I license my work is a branching scenario activity
- Delve Deep in the CC Licences is also a branching scenario activity
- Creative Commons Personality Test (created in collaboration with Christine Daouti) is also a branching scenario activity
- Open Resource Jar is a list of websites that offer free resources for reuse.
The point is not to replace more comprehensive copyright or Creative Commons guidance. It is to give people an accessible doorway into it.
Decorating the tree (the first weekend of December), or, if you prefer, Santa’s List Day (4 December).
I created a short branching copyright activity where players help a Brownie to decorate the tree.
Again, behind the fun format is an opportunity to prompt people to think. Branching scenarios work particularly well for copyright because learners must make a decision. Instead of simply being told a rule, they encounter a situation, decide what they would do and see where that decision takes them.
There is something very useful about allowing people to make mistakes in an environment where the only consequence might be finding themselves temporarily on Santa’s naughty list.
Permission to play
Creating these activities has made me think about play not simply as a way of making copyright training “more fun”, but as another approach to copyright literacy.
A playful activity can lower the barrier to participation. It can create curiosity. It can give people a safe space to make choices, get something wrong, try again, and perhaps talk about why an answer differed from what they expected.
Most importantly, it can help make copyright visible. Even more than that it is that I have fun creating the activities!
A colleague unlikely to open a long piece of copyright guidance might take two minutes to find their Creative Commons personality or whether Santa thinks they have behaved themselves. That interaction might be small, but it creates an opportunity to learn something and, perhaps, to remember where copyright support is available when a real question arises.
None of this means abandoning workshops, written guidance or more substantial copyright education. Rather, I see these activities as another tool we can add to our copyright literacy toolkit.
And they are designed to be shared.
If you work in copyright, scholarly communications, libraries or education and think one of these activities might work with your own colleagues, please feel free to use it. They are all Creative Commons licensed. You can find more games and activities on my domain.
After all, copyright literacy shouldn’t be something we keep to ourselves. And if we can learn a little copyright while discovering whether Santa thinks we have been naughty or nice, all the better.
Erica Levi. (2026). “A copyright Advent calendar – making copyright literacy a little more playful”. © Coventry University. Creative Commons Licence Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
