#tweetsmart

Chapter 12. Web Scavenger Hunt

Tweet this Project

When I was a boy, every year on a chilly October morning, in preparation for hosting all the neighborhood kids at my birthday party, my parents would sneak around the yard of our brown saltbox suburban home stashing small plastic prizes and scribbled clues. The clues were scratched out in garbled cursive, so as to look old and mysterious—an effect created, I’m pretty sure, by my dad writing with his left hand. My parents were, of course, putting together a scavenger hunt.

The first clue was always placed under a frisbee in the center of the front yard. A group of us kids would bounce excitedly around the frisbee—mostly in anticipation of cake—until my dad called out from the front steps of the house, “GO!” We’d flip the frisbee, decipher the first clue, and scatter to the wind, very unstrategically scouring the yard for the next clue. We were off and running—our little heads occupied with the frenzy of the moment—and so my parents took the opportunity to go inside and ready the house for a dozen screaming eight-year-olds.

For reasons you can see, scavenger hunts have a soft spot in my heart. This project is modeled after my childhood scavenger hunts, but with a digital twist. To do correctly, this project will require some technical know-how, as you’ll need to integrate a customized version of Twitter’s “Tweet This” button into several pages of your site. If you’re uncomfortable cutting and pasting JavaScript code into your website’s ...