My oldest son has a birthday party coming up really soon. For the first time in awhile we have decided not to do the pre-canned birthday party. You know, the ones that are offered by all the kids themed places. The Chuck-E-Main-Event-Bounce party, for lack of a better term. Jackson decided that he wanted to do a sleepover party, which was good because I was trying to think of a way to broach the subject with him that I didn’t want to do a pre-canned party for him this year. I wanted to do something that he and his friends could have fun and that we could make unique in our own way. Of course, now that he has decided to have a sleepover party, that begs the question: Now What?Keeping a single 4th grader entertained for a night is not that difficult. Keeping two children entertained is not all that hard. But when you have half a dozen or more (as of this writing, I still don’t know how many will come, but I think 10 have been invited) 4th graders, you need to do some planning. So that’s what I did. Luckily, for Christmas I got a book called ‘Geek Dad’s Guide to Weekend Fun’. Now being a geek and a dad doesn’t mean that I don’t know how to have fun on a weekend. The book has ideas that you might not have thought of to have fun with your kids in a geeky way. There was an idea in there that I had been wanting to do since I read it and this partly afforded me the opportunity to execute on it, a high tech scavenger/treasure hunt. Here’s how it works.
In a typical treasure hunt, you find a clue and it directs you somehow to the next clue, either with explicit directions or something a little more vague. With the digital treasure hunt, I’m going to split the kids into teams of two or three (it depends on how many show up) and give each team an old iphone or ipod touch that we happen to have laying around the house. Their first clue is on a web page. They will either have to find something in the house or answer a riddle or count things in the house and enter the correct answer to get the next clue. The best part about it is that since they are using a web page, I can do three separate treasure hunts so that they can’t figure out the clue based on what the next team is doing!
Creating the hunt is fairly simple, but even with the help of the book that I read through I did have a hard time getting things started. With that in mind, I wanted to give you a few tips of how to construct the clues to get you started on your own hunt. When I’m done with that, I’ll direct you to the code on my pages so that if you feel so inclined, you can copy for yourself! Here’s some starter tips:
- Close-up photos make great clues. If you have something unique in your house that is relatively identifiable for those who can pay attention these make great objects to photo and use as clues. ESPECIALLY if it has words on it that you can use as an answer. That way, even if they know WHAT it is, they still need to find it to actually enter the answer.
- Use what you have available. On the hunt that I’ll post further down the list, you’ll see that I have the kids dial a number on our home phones. I’m a big phone nerd and so I have a phone system with a voicemail system. It was easy for me to put together a voicemail box that would answer and play audio of the clue that I wanted them to try and figure out.
- Use riddles. Several of the clues that I have used are riddles. This is simply because my son will be playing with many of his friends and if they were all just “find this” or “find that”, he would have an unfair advantage. A quick search on the Internet will find you some good kid friendly riddles.
- Don’t be afraid to bring education into it. One of the items in the first hunt that I did had them add up all the numbers on a dart board. This made them have to find a dart board in the house and then when they found it they had to use math skills to actually come up with the answer.
- Video is a possibility. You should be able to embed video in one of the web pages for a clue. I haven’t used this yet, but I’m trying to figure out how I can leverage video to present a good clue.
Now that you’ve started getting your clues together, you can worry about how to make this into a web page that will be visible on the phone/ipod device. The first thing that you will need to figure out is where you are going to host this web site. You can’t just dump a bunch of files on your computer and hope that it will work, though that would be nice. For presenting the web pages, you have a couple of options: 1. install a web server on your computer or 2. Already have a web host out on the Internet that you can just add a directory to.
I chose the second option because I already have a web host and adding another directory to present the scavenger hunt took me less than a minute. If you’re not that lucky, then you will need to go with option 1, which really isn’t that terribly hard, but it does take a little bit more time. The easiest thing to set up would be an Apache web server. I’m not going to get into the details of how to install this, but a quick google search on how to install Apache on <operating system> yeilded some pretty quick and straightforward results.
Now that you have the web server ready to go, simply start creating your html files and putting them in the web root of your web server (or folder on your web host). For Apache, I believe this starts at htdocs, but several of the documents out there show how to change this location. Next you need to build your web page. If you navigate to the following two files and view their source, you will see all there is to see to make this work:
http://samplefive.com/hunt/start-1.html
http://samplefive.com/hunt/style.css
The second file is just a style sheet that arranges the page and font settings the way that I have it on the page. If you are well versed in style sheets, you can create your own or modify this one. If you’re like me, then you can just swipe this and use it as is. The first file is the meat of the scavenger hunt. There are really only a couple of lines that need to change for each new clue and they are as follows:
if(f.answer.value.toLowerCase()==’menu’) <=== On this line, you need to change menu to whatever the answer to your question will be.
window.location=’menu.html’; <=== On this line, change menu to whatever the destination file will be called when they get the answer correct. It doesn’t matter if this doesn’t match your answer, it was just easier for me to set it up this way.
<h1>Clue #1:</h1> <=== Change this line to reflect the appropriate clue number
<center><img src=”fleur.jpg” border=”0″><BR> <===This line displays an image for your clue. If you don’t want an image, just remove this line. Otherwise, change the name of the image to what you want.
To find your next clue, you have to find the item in the picture above. It will be on something that has a lot of words. Enter the first word below to get your next clue: <=== This is the clue text that you will enter. This is the last thing you will need to change on your html page.
Just keep making additional pages until you feel you have enough clues for a full fledged scavenger hunt! If you want to see what clues I used, just click go here: http://samplefive.com/hunt/start-1.html and enter the following answers to make it all the way through and see all the clues for the first hunt:
Clue #1: menu
Clue #2: 13
Clue #3 (the clue is: John’s mom has seven children, the first six are named Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday. What’s the seventh child’s name?): john
Clue #4: hunt
Clue #5: 210
Clue #6: yankee candle
Clue #7: incorrectly
Clue #8: yurtle
Clue #9: finished
I hope that helps get you a good start if you’re looking to make a digital scavenger hunt for your own children!