Scavenger Hunt on the Go

During the 2015 orientation at the CUNY Grad School of Journalism I designed and deployed a leader board for the Journalism Scavenger Hunt.* The rules were similar to your regular hunts: find as many listed places as you can in a limited amount of time, and the team with the most places wins.

Teams type in their team name and are shown a map of the places they have been.

The difference was that the leader board would let you check your process in real time (as long as you named your team right) on your phone. It relied on instagram #’s and location tags to work. Once a team typed in their name, the leader board would show the results on a map hosted on Carto (previously named CartoDB).

The final map of the scavenger hunt

*Update 2016: due to Instagram’s API change in late 2015, the posting functionality does not work anymore without some overhaul of the oauth process. (Project code is on GitHub, albeit a little dated.) If you’d like to see what the teams saw when they checked the app before the API change, you could still access the team page. Try this link for #teamMuckrakers, or this one for #team2kewl4skool.