Scavenger hunt on steroids

How to engage your event audience through low-cost activities

Who doesn’t like the sweat and excitement, joy and disappointment, and moments of triumph during an adventurous scavenger hunt? We love it. That’s why we created this experience at our TEDxTUM event in 2022 with the theme “Fill in the ___”. We created three different interactive challenges with riddles that visitors could solve on their phones and in real life. This activity wasn’t just a very fun way to pass time during the event breaks — it also gave people the opportunity to get to know each other by solving the riddles together. In addition, it is not only a low budget-activity, but also sustainable!

The activity at a glance

“Fill in the ___: Scavenger Hunt” offered three different challenges, each of them thematically connected to one of the speakers’ ideas. While the ‘climate change’ challenge encouraged attendees to save the rainforest, the ‘social media’ challenge required them to catch the hacker and the ‘AI’ challenge had them complete various tasks to at the end complete an AI tool for detecting sleep deprivation.

Each challenge had a different level of difficulty and contained a mix of tasks that had to be completed on the phone as well as in physical spaces at the venue. On average, each challenge contained 5 tasks, amongst others logic games, general knowledge quizzes, pantomime, and searches around the venue. The list of tasks per challenge is publicly available here.

To make the challenges easier to follow, minimalistic illustrations were added to the entertaining storylines. In addition, to make sure the game ran smoothly at the event, a few of our volunteers were responsible for guiding and helping the scavenger hunt players.

Upon successful completion of a challenge, attendees were invited to write down their names on the game’s webpage to participate in a raffle and win a prize.

The tech behind the game

To make the game work, we created a hidden page on the TEDxTUM website.. Attendees were provided with instructions for the game and could start playing.

By clicking on a challenge a Google Forms paged opened where the stories and instructions guided you through each riddle. We choose Google Forms because it is easy to use and access and works seamlessly on mobile devices. We set up the form so that participants could not go further in the story unless the previous riddle had been solved.

The activity in action

To make sure that attendees knew about the scavenger hunt game, posters with QR codes were placed around the venue and the game was mentioned during the first session.

The game not only added value to attendees’ event experience, but it also enabled us to receive some useful information from participants. As an example, one task asked players to write down how far they had traveled to come to the event and what form of transportation they had used. This information then gave us the opportunity to estimate the carbon footprint of our attendees’ journey.

Where do we go from here?

Around 50 people completed each of the three challenges and we received extremely positive feedback from attendees and team members alike. In our experience, the best activities can be low budget (we spent under 30€(!)) as long as they are fun and give visitors the opportunity to get to know each other while keeping in mind that not everyone loves to interact with other people all the time. When providing this activity, it’s important to make sure that there is a stable and easily accessible wifi at the event, and that your team is briefed and can help out in case of technical difficulties or when someone gets stuck solving one of the riddles.

Have fun designing your own scavenger hunt!:)

Authors:
Lara Vehovec
Linda Lungala