From open source to proprietary, from down to earth to fully digital. Scavenger hunts want you to move your body!

Open Source

Dr. Kai Erenli told us about his method called ‚QuizeRo‘ that doesn‘t need any special software, no coding and is easy to realize.

Use QR codes and Google Forms!

At every station of your scavenger hunt you will put a QR code that will link to a Google form you designed (one per station) with one or more questions, or info or … When read, answered correctly or incorrectly (settings in Google forms) by the participants, the coordinates of the next location will be revealed, usually with some hint on where/how to find the QR code (e.g. at the bottom of the lamppost^[1]).

There is really no coding involved!

For the participants the process looks like this:

1. Scan QR-Code
2. Answer question
3. Receive location of the new QR-Code
4. Go there (and back to 1.)

One Scenario

Incomings at a university: Usually they are disoriented. The goal is to introduce them to the city and campus.

The most important

Use a story, a mission!

We don’t have to be entertaining but we can.

The hero’s journey should give you enough input to come up with a good story.

https://youtu.be/yZxs_jGN7Pg

The Steps

1. Think of a story
2. Design the path (on a map)
3. Get the coordinates
4. Design questions on GoogleForms
5. Create the QR-Codes
6. Go hide them
7. Start playing to test your scavenger hunt

Hot Tips

• Begin with an easy question!
• Make sure it is only possible to answer the question on that spot (or only get the new coordinates on that spot).
• Geo coordinates should be in the range of 2 meters. This means that you need to give enough clues for the participants to find the QR codes.
• Adapt the level of complexity to your audience!
• To produce the QR codes use zxing.appspot.com/generator or http://www.qr-code-generator.com

Further Material

Kai’s Prezi

Citation: Birkenkrahe M., Erenli K. (2014) QuizeRo – Recipe for a Successful QR-Code Scavenger Hunt. In: Göbel S., Wiemeyer J. (eds) Games for Training, Education, Health and Sports. GameDays 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8395. Springer, Cham

Further Reference: Erenli, K.: Gamify Your Teaching – Using Location-Based Games for Educational Purposes. International Journal of Advanced Corporate Learning, iJAC 6(2), 22–27 (2013)

PDF: QuizeRo – Scavenger Hunt Recipe

Proprietary Tools

There are many proprietary tools around. To mention a few:

• Actionbound
• The Gruffalo Spotter – Making of (YouTube); The Gruffalo Spotter App
• Pokemon
• and Geocaching

Geocaching

So, I needed to try out Geocaching (AppStore), and I was successful.

 

Our Mission in Lucca

As a group, we did GC1N3X2 (you need a premium account to get to it in the App, so we went traditional, cf. paper below).

The mission: Match the pictures (1-11) to the location indicated by GPS coordinates (A-L). Then replace the letters of the given formula (indicated) with the numbers and get a new GPS location. There you will find the box, i.e. cache!

I mapped the locations on my Google map with ‚Want to go‘ stars (green flags), and we got on our way to find out which picture would match which location.

We left out two locations. One, we solved with Google Streetview, and the other one resulted from the rest. We got the new GPS coordinates, walked all the way back where we started, found the cache, signed the log and put an ‚iED Knowledge Token‘ in it!

It was a lot of fun, especially as a group who doesn‘t know each other well. We had a purpose and enough time to chat on the way. It is also a wonderful way to explore a city. Try it out!

Leaping to Augmented Reality

I somehow missed this workshop about AR and creating your own app. (It was meant for the Android platform.)

This guy’s website is full of cool things. I will have to check out ARIS.

The following is an example of a very well done AR ‘Scavenger Hunt’. On the picture you see a building (in the background) and the mobile phone enhances the building’s reality with its history, with a picture from many years ago.

 

 

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