I remember early in my teaching career, when I would take my class to the garden center at our school, it would almost instantly become a free-for-all. Kids playing tag, climbing trees, and having sword fights with sticks. Because I typically did not have a clear objective for the students, or I was just trying to do indoor stuff outdoors, the students quickly associated being outside with recess. What I needed was a template for what I was doing that helped provide structure and focus to the activity. What I needed to get started was a good old scavenger hunt.

The Activity

You’re probably familiar with scavenger hunts already. Someone creates a list of items or phenomena to observe or gather, and you check them off a list as you see or collect those items. My mom created a scavenger hunt for my birthday one year, and my friends and I went door to door in our neighborhood asking if they had certain items to fulfill our list (apparently my mom cleared this with the neighbors ahead of time). The team that completed the list first got their cake first (or something like that). The main characteristics of this activity were that it was time-bound, area-limited, and it spanned a variety fo categories. In other words, we only had an hour, we had to stay between 14th and 16th streets, and the list contained items from the kitchen, garage/shed, bathroom, pantry, etc.

So, what does this have to do with teaching and learning? It just so happens there are many instructional applications to an activity like this. Scavenger hunts focus student attention on specific things, whether it’s features in nature like trees and animals, the built environment, civics concepts like public services, or classifying trash found on the school yard. Students could also do the same thing in their neighborhoods. The job of the teacher in this instance is to find connections between what they are learning and their local environment. I have seen scavenger hunts applied to everything from nature walks to campus visits to reviewing a college syllabus (personally, even a scavenger hunt cannot make a syllabus fun). The power behind a scavenger hunt seems to be its ability to get students moving, to focus their attention in specific ways, and the competitive dynamic of competing against a list (or each other).

Scavenger hunts also have their limits. For one, some things can’t simply be observed and checked off a list, either because they are too small, too elusive, or too abstract. This includes microscopic organisms, wildlife, or concepts that might be easily misinterpreted or hard to understand (I recently helped a high school teacher create a scavenger hunt around some abstract social justice concepts, and it was a bit of a conceptual lift for the students). Another limitation of scavenger hunts is that they don’t really guide students toward a deep dive into the content. There is a big difference between looking for and recognizing something and analyzing or evaluating it. Scavenger hunts can be great for introducing a topic or creating interest in a concept, and they can also be a good way to introduce a complicated tool or process without layering in a complicated activity.

Tech Options

When it comes to scavenger hunts, teachers have options ranging from high tech to low tech to no tech. Teacher’s decisions should be guided by several factors, including the age of the children (Do young children really need to be using devices for this?), where you are doing the scavenger hunt (Are you going to be in a remote area with poor service or a high likelihood of losing or damaging a device?), or the type of activity (What is the value added by technology? Does the activity include capturing media or geolocations?) My point is, even though I tend to lean towards including technology in my teaching, it may not always be necessary or even practical.

High Tech

If you want to design an activity that includes a lot of technology, you have some great options. GooseChase is a mobile app designed specifically for scavenger hunts. It can be set up for individuals or teams (the free version only allows 3 teams per “game”), and each mission (or step in the scavenger hunt) can involve teams entering text responses, capturing images or video, or be GPS specific. The GPS missions can only be met if a person or group is within a specific distance from a specific GPS coordinates.

Another high tech option for scavenger hunts is to have students report their observations on a geo-enabled form, like Survey123 or Field Maps by ArcGIS Online. Both of these options operate like a standard web form, but they also capture GPS coordinates and sync them to a map. Below is an example of scavenger hunt I created for a teacher professional development using Survey123.

Low Tech

Each of the scavenger hunt options described above requires some tech know-how, and it may be more than many teachers are willing to take on. If a teacher wants their scavenger hunt to include media (images and video), they can still have students capture the experience without hassling with forms or GPS, they can create a place to dump all the media. I was recently told about PhotoCircle, a secure way for groups to pool their photos. Teachers would have to decide how to set this up (one big album or albums for each group), but this is a low tech way of capturing media and syncing it to one place without the hassle of forms and uploading. Teachers could do something similar with Google Drive or Photos, and they would have to decide if the students will do the syncing, or if they will do it after the activity is over. One thing to consider when having students participate in media-based scavenger hunts is to challenge them not to include their faces or any other identifying information. Even if there is no clear risk or danger in capturing student identities, it’s important to go above and beyond the minimum expectations when protecting student privacy. This will also challenge them to be more creative as they think about perspective, angles, and communicating with visual information.

No Tech

The easiest entry point for a scavenger hunt is to do it without any technology. This requires the least amount of preparation (from a data collection standpoint) and will still introduce students to the concept of observing the world around them. Some variations of this approach include using a checklist (below), gathering items in a bag, or creating a bracelet or bookmark with gathered items. Some downsides to this no-tech approach are that not all observations can be “collected,” and there is nothing preventing students from checking things off their list without actually observing them. Cheaters will always find a way to cheat! Both of these concerns can be addressed with just a little creativity.

If your goal is to get kids out from behind their desks and out into the world, scavenger hunts are a great place to start. I have a feeling once you try one, your creative teacher brain will start to imagine countless variations on this activity that provide a unique, memorable, and relevant way to connect students to the content they are learning.

What are some scavenger hunt strategies you have used in your teaching? What are some of the tech tools you have used that I overlooked?