4 Things Teaching Taught Me About Planning a Better Treasure Hunt

First, Black Lives Matter: if, like me, you live in Toronto, and you’re wondering where to get your hands on some of the books from the links in my last post, you can borrow a lot of them from OverDrive here. If you’re Canadian, you can donate to Black Lives Matter in Canada (and read more about their organization and plans) here. Let’s aim to be here for the long haul, not just the news cycle!

I have a tendency to decide everything I do in one sphere of my life teaches me more about how to succeed in another. Maybe it’s my personality: I love the satisfaction I get out of re-purposing things, whether it’s cutting up a warped leather belt to fix the broken zipper pulls on my backpack or cannibalizing parts of an old story to improve a new novel.

But this spring, when I made a social isolation online treasure hunt for my friends and family on Facebook*, I realized my experiences between now and the last hunt I made had fundamentally changed my approach.

See, after my murder mystery hunt, I became a university lecturer. I started teaching hundreds of adults every semester. And learning to do that well taught me some important transferable skills that just so happen to apply to treasure hunts as well as pop quizzes.**

1. Don’t think about how hard you want it to be; think of why you want them to do it.

One thing every teacher and student I know hates is when a class has a mandated grade spread: only such-and-such a percent can get As; the average has to be within 5% of X.

We hate it for obvious reasons: what if you happen to have a class of smarties? What if the class happens to do poorly as a group, and you’re concerned that they don’t actually understand important material for future courses, but you still have to bell some of them up to excellent grades? What if the teacher is really bad, but because there’s a bell curve, the marks don’t flag that for anyone in authority? What if the teacher is really good and students are getting punished because their peers are also learning?

By now, it’s an accepted best practice not to plan tests/assignments with the idea of a certain number of students getting particular results. Instead, we’re to consider the intended learning outcomes: What skills and understanding should a successful assignment demonstrate? What does B level work mean in terms of those skills and understanding? What is the difference between the skills of a student who should pass, but barely, and the skills of a student who hasn’t learned enough course material to be considered competent?

I’ve learned to treat planning puzzles and clues the same way: if I concentrate on making sure X percent of players can’t solve the puzzle within Y time, I end up including boring limitations for the sake of limitations. Plus, I can’t accurately predict my teams’ abilities any more than I can predict those of my students. Instead, I focus on what I want the puzzle-solving experience to be about. What fun tasks do I want my players to complete? How will there be room within that task to work as a team/explore new ideas/make interesting decisions?

2. Don’t try to plan the experience; if it’s important, show the path.

It took me a really long time to realize that my first approach to planning treasure hunts was so completely wrong. I was thinking like a writer and a reader, trying to recreate fun scenes from my favourite books in which characters solved a puzzle or figured out an ancient riddle.

The trouble with that was, writing scenes of puzzle-solving and writing puzzles to solve are almost opposites. When you write a scene of discovery, you get to set the pace, and you can control it to make sure your characters are always engaged and engaging. You can make sure the protagonist happens to visit the right person at the right time to cue their “Eureka!” moment.

But when you write a puzzle or clue, you can’t control how fast the players solve it or what knowledge they already have. You can’t control whether they’ll feel frustrated or patient. You can’t control anything about their situation.

So planning clues has to be more like developing classroom assignments. I can’t–and shouldn’t–try to control students’ approaches to the assignment, so long as they arrive at the end product I’m hoping for. Sure, I can aim for particular experiences–projects that are fun or eye-opening or self-expressive–but I can’t force those experiences to happen. If it’s important to guide them along a particular path, then I need to scaffold the work by providing intermediate steps/benchmarks for them to “hit” and reasons for them to complete that scaffolding.

For instance, in my online hunt, I wanted players to take a few virtual tours. For some tours, I wanted players to actually “walk”/”fly” around inside the space on a particular path, so I gave sequential instructions they had to follow with feedback of what success at each step looked like and information they needed to find at each “stop” on the tour. For others, I wanted players to have more freedom to do things their way, so I gave them an end goal and let them have at it.

3. Don’t spend too much time trying to stop cheaters; spend it making sure the majority who don’t cheat will get something out of it.

There’s something about the idea of someone getting something they don’t deserve that instinctively boils the blood. For many people, it’s more important that nobody gets more than they’ve earned than that nobody goes without what they need. We see this everywhere, from the politics of social safety nets to discussions of academic accommodation policy.

If you’re designing an assignment or a puzzle, yes, it’s important to consider how to prevent “cheating”–getting positive results without doing the important work. And it’s important to take reasonable precautions: for example, when I password-protect a digital clue, I choose a password that isn’t simple and easy to guess. When I design a writing assignment, I often change details between semesters so students from a later semester can’t directly copy the work of those from a previous semester.

The key is to be reasonable, whatever that means for you. In my experience in the classroom, the vast majority of students want to learn and earn their marks. And when I catch one of those few who do violate academic integrity policy, the vast majority of them are cheating out of ignorance of what’s not allowed and/or panic-cheating in response to outside pressures, like not understanding fundamental skills or having other stressful demands on their time, not maliciously trying to game the system just because they can. I’ve taught for several years, but I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of students I’ve encountered whose actions and attitudes suggested that even with appropriate academic supports, they’d still have chosen to cheat rather than earn their grade.

Likewise, the vast majority of people who play treasure hunts are there to have fun by solving the clues, not to win at any cost. They don’t want to skip every step and get to the end (unless you’ve offered a super ginormous prize). If they do win, they want it to be because they were faster and more clever/organized/etc. than the other teams–because they earned it.

4. Test the systems, not just the challenges.

I always tested my clues before making a hunt public, deciphering text by hand and triple-checking arithmetic. Likewise, I always make sure that I could complete the assignments I give my students. That doesn’t mean I never let mistakes slip through–I mess up like everyone else–but it does mean I catch the majority of errors before anyone else sees what I’ve developed.

However, from teaching, I’ve learned to make sure not just that the clues or assignments are solid but also that the systems players or learners will have to use once they complete those challenges are solid as well.

For example, I want my students to submit something to the online course management system before it’s time to turn in their first major assignment. If there’s a tech problem, we all want to know about it now, when it’s just important, rather than later, when it becomes both important and urgent. Making sure the students known what a successful submission looks like when there’s no time pressure or assignment due also helps if, later on, they encounter a system error: at least they know what should be happening and that something has gone wrong.

For that reason, I started my social isolation hunt with a quick test to make sure the players were able to successfully scan a QR code and use an online encryption/decryption service. If we were going to have technical trouble, I wanted to be able to address that with teams right out the gate, so that later, when the competition got intense, nobody would run into last-minute problems like not knowing how to download a QR scanner.

There were still tech issues–for example, any password including a “smart” punctuation mark had to be converted to plain text before the system would accept it. If I were planning the hunt (or revising it) again, I’d make sure to work that into the tutorial somehow too. But overall, I think, just as in the classroom, introducing participants to the software and systems before any error became urgent helped keep the experience smooth.

* The full treasure hunt materials are here (link gives you the top-level folder where you can access all the clues without solving the previous ones and find resources like email templates you can use to run the hunt yourself), and I’ve put them under Creative Commons license. The hunt needs a facilitator to run it; you’re welcome to run it yourself. I recommend that you play the clues at least once before you do. You’re also welcome to take a look, try out whatever clues you feel like, and just enjoy yourself.

** jk, I don’t do pop quizzes. It just made the sentence flow better. :D