Hunting Grounds

The last two weeks my attention has been pretty well captured by Parts & Crafts, the summer camp my housemates run. They invited me to come teach this past session, which was themed ‘Imaginary Worlds’. We made card games, choose your own adventure books, chocolate aliens, telegraphs - but by far everyone’s favorite activity was the Puzzle Hunt.

I bought a mailbox and hung it up inside the camp. Every morning, I surreptitiously dropped in a letter from ‘Doctor Dangerous’, a veteran puzzle hunter (and rather pompous character) who gave them clues about the different puzzles they needed to solve. We ended up doing four main ones, plus a meta. Their favorite puzzle was definitely the videogame one:

I wrote it in Scratch. It’s an image of camp which the kids had to trawl around in, matching up posters hung physically in the space with the clues that appeared in the game. The answers they needed to input were all numbers (so I could hide them in equations in the source code, which is inherently open in Scratch) and they needed to use a cipher to get from the words on the posters to the actual answers.

My favorite moment was probably when the kids were all going, “But what’s a cipher?” and Sasha, the only girl doing the puzzle hunt, turned to me and said, “I know ciphers! It’s like when you turn letters to numbers or shift letters over so A is C and B is D.” Which were exactly the two ciphers they needed. Of course none of the boys listened to Sasha for a good twenty minutes.

They also really liked the pancake puzzle. Pancakes were a running theme in all of the letters - as I mentioned in a previous entry, Dr. Dangerous was ostensibly at a hunt in Lichtenstein where all the puzzles were made of pancakes. We all made the batter together, then I shooed the hunters out of the kitchen while I made them a series of pancakes in patterns of numbers, such as {3,.,1,4,1,5} and {1,1,2,3,5,8} and {1,2,3,5,7,11}. Once they figured out a pattern, they made me the next puzzle piece.

Bonus points to the first commenter who knows the next number in each of the above sequences. (Bonus points can be exchanged for internet high fives.)

So yeah, that was my two weeks. Exhausting, but fun.

Please email me if you want copies of the letters or other puzzles. I’m not putting them up on my teaching page for now because they’re so camp-specific, I doubt another teacher could use them for more than inspiration.