The Class Scavenger Hunts
First of all I wanted to say how much I enjoyed being involved in this project. I had a great time working with my team to try and create a project using a type media that is new to me. After going on the other two hunts, I am imagining more that can be done than just what we accomplished. I learned a lot from the other teams.
That said, some of the things I learned that could be improved. For one thing, me and my team didn’t take into account the fact of GPS drift. For the most part this didn’t affect us too negatively, but we were unable to find the final location on a team’s project. We got close, but we never found their marker. As for our project, had we not pointed the team in the right direction of the first point, they may have never found our markers. So…that in mind, I think it is doubly important to make the first marker really easy to find, and the clue to the first marker a bit easier to decipher.
Another little tid bit I noticed is the design of the web pages. One group had a really sleekly done web page…but it didn’t seem to match the rest of the project. Another group had simple yet elegant pages done and they went really well with their markers, but in the light of the day, it was very hard to see the screen. We chose to make our web pages rudimentary because we felt like it would match our markers, tie into our overall message, and with the high contrast be easy to read outside. Although I liked this idea, when I saw how amazing the other team’s web site’s were, I was truly impressed and starting thinking about the other elements we could’ve incorporated to give more visual clues to our markers.
The final thing I took away from this project is that I feel like I had a ton of energy for the first hunt. By the time we got to the last location on their hunt I started getting tired. When we encountered technical difficulties with the second hunt my instinct was to give up. In the future as a designer, I might want to make my hunt fool proof so there would be no chance of technical difficulties. How I would accomplish this is something I have not yet worked out. But what I did enjoy about this media type is the social interaction it brings coupled with interaction with the physical space.
I agree. I think simplifying the devices and streamlining the whole process people have to go through in the project would not only make it easier, but also more accessible. Reducing the number of devices is my first thought, but there’s something to be said for different group members to have different roles or jobs on the hunt: one to watch the GPS device, one on the laptop, and the other keeping eyes out for clues (and making sure the other two don’t run into anything while zoned out into the screens of their devices). When everyone has a job to do or a part to play in the whole scheme of things, the social aspect of the project kicks in because of the intense amount of communication necessary for the group to get anywhere together.
Do you think the order of the marker’s difficulty really matters? Would the hunters ever been bold enough to think beyond the basic paths of campus if the atrium were last, or third, or fifth? I only ask because the last point in the old Art School required us to be a little more bold and adventurous and it was the final waypoint of that particular hunt.
Comment by ktucker — March 1, 2008 @ 1:57 am