Things to Find on a Scavenger Hunt

Costumes

• You can use costumes for a scavenger hunt in a number of ways. For instance, you could purchase several components of various costumes and give each guest a list of components to find to complete their attire. You could also have participants take photographs of people wearing certain costumes on Halloween or certain articles of clothing on normal days, or you could challenge your participants to build a specific costume, such as a pirate or a princess, using the least amount of money possible.

Impromptu Scenarios

• Instead of asking participants to find objects, ask them to take pictures of themselves performing certain actions. For instance, you could tell your teams to take pictures of themselves trying to squeeze together in tiny spaces, such as phone booth, a bathtub or a doghouse, or you could require that they take pictures of themselves with certain people, such as a person over the age of 85, a famous person or a driver of a red convertible. Alternatively, you could tell your teams to perform certain actions on video, such as getting a police officer to sing the national anthem, staging a kung-fu fight on the street or purchasing a small item with only pennies.

Digital Media

• Scavenger hunts do not have to take place in person, nor do they require tangible objects to find. You can host a scavenger hunt online, asking teams to locate certain pieces of digital information on the Internet by using social media resources such as YouTube, Wikipedia and Facebook. You could also ask teams to locate real objects without leaving their computers. For example, DARPA once placed several red weather balloons in random locations across the United States; a team from MIT used web-based social networking to find all of the balloons in less than nine hours.

Social Awareness

• In an effort to raise awareness about homelessness, some activists have initiated "scavenger hunts" to help people find out what it's like to be homeless. Instead of searching for regular clues or objects, they search for things such as "a place where a homeless person take a shower," "food to feed your family costing $8 or less" or "the cheapest used car you can find." By searching for these items, the scavengers what challenges the homeless face on a daily basis, and they raise awareness in the community when others see them on their hunt.