Visitors to Seward High Oct. 12-15 may have noticed the QR codes hanging around the building. They were part of a scavenger hunt, developed by students, for college week.
Ben Galusha, William Brown and Bryson Schluckebier worked on the scavenger hunt after Noelle Baker, one of the high school counselors, approached them with the idea.
The three students, all seniors at Seward High, chose 12 colleges in Nebraska for the questions.
“We got our hands dirty with a bunch of knowledge,” Brown said.
Galusha found websites to generate the QR codes and linked each to a Google form.
“We decided to go as simple as possible,” Galusha said.
Participating students sign in using their e-mail, and the form records who they are, when they participated and what their answer to the question was. That data is then put into a spreadsheet, Galusha said.
Schluckebier said the questions were easy and included information like enrollment and the college’s founding date.
Brown said the questions were paired with teachers from the high school who attended that college.
Riddles next to the QR codes provided clues to the next location on the scavenger hunt, Schluckebier said.
One of the unforeseen challenges, according to Brown, was getting the right school.
“There’s a Midland University in Texas,” he said.
Galusha said putting the forms together was something new for him because he hadn’t worked with that application before. After he went through the QR codes, he had to adjust a couple to get the participants closer to the webpage where the answer was.
Senior Kaylee O’Dell was one of the students who went through the scavenger hunt.
“I was the first to complete it,” she said. “I thought it was awesome.”
Galusha said the students didn’t have to follow the codes in order to complete the hunt. Since it took longer to complete than they expected, he said, the results may be skewed toward the students with free periods.
All three of the young men plan to go to college and study computer science of some kind.
Schluckebier will attend the University of Northern Iowa, Galusha plans to go to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and Brown will go to Iowa State University and study aerospace engineering.
“I’m glad people participated,” Brown and Schluckebier said.
