Cary Scavenger Hunt: There’s an App For That

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Cary, NC  – Over the seven years that CaryCitizen has produced the annual Cary Scavenger Hunt, we have made many improvements along the way. This year will mark our biggest improvement to date: A PHONE APP!

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Every year after the Hunt concludes, we survey our teams, volunteers and sponsors to ask how we might improve the event. We get all sorts of suggestions, from the silly to the sublime. We listen to all of it. Improvements made over the seven years include:

  • The addition of more judges to make the scoring faster.
  • Electronic scoring, so that judges would be freed from math mistakes.
  • Two years ago, we added video monitors so that teams could see their standings in the overall score outcomes.
  • Folks wanted raffle prizes so that everyone could be a winner.

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No Cheaters!

But one comment we heard repeatedly has been to reduce the perceived activity of cheaters. It’s hard. Teams are competitive and its seems impossible that a team could find almost every one of our 70 clue questions in just four hours. Some folks think teams get outside help or that they split up. We all want to put an end to such shenanigans. It’s also impossible to have volunteers hang out at 70 locations around town to verify who plays by the rules. We think we have an answer:

We give you: The Cary Scavenger Hunt APP!

The CSH App

Every team will download the Cary Scavenger Hunt app from their phone’s app store. Using the email address with which they registered their team, they can go in and create a username and password and be ready to enter photos and answers.

Each of the seventy questions will require the team captain to log-in to the app, and either enter an answer or upload a photo. Some questions will require an item to be retrieved and those will be placed in their clue bags. These photos and answers will be seen on a separate computer screen by our judges when it is time to score the teams.

Teams will not get credit for their answers until our judges verify if the answers are indeed correct.

HuntApp

More About the App

The app will be simple to use and will just have the question number and space for each answer listed. The questions are all in our top secret clue books. All teams receive their cluebooks at 9:30 on the morning of the event. All questions that require a team photo will need each team member included, wearing their Event Day t-shirts, and then all photos must be uploaded into the app. If a question requires the team find an item, they will show the item to the judge. We believe that the app will greatly speed up the judging process, allowing us to have more teams to be judged during our 2- hour scoring window.

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Scores- Where Can you See Them?

All scores will be displayed on the Cary Scavenger Hunt website when the winners are announced at the event finale. This can be viewed at the event finish on our tv monitors and seen from any mobile device. We will keep the scores live for a full year on that websites score TAB. All teams will be emailed a link to this website, if they don’t know that site already. We also plan to load all of the clue questions with their corresponding answers the day after the hunt. Just for fun

 

Event Info

The 2016 Cary Scavenger Hunt

Saturday, September 17, 2016
Page-Walker Arts & History Center
119 Ambassador Loop, Downtown Cary
Check-in 8:30-9:15am
Hunt takes place between 9:30am- 1:30pm when teams must return
Judging from 1- 3:00pm when Winners area announced onsite

Registration and Info here

 

Story by Lindsey Chester.