Scavenger hunt

A scavenger hunt is a game in which individuals or teams seek to find all items on a list. For instance, the list might include: "A four leaf clover, a quartz crystal, and a photocopy of an Escher print." The list might also require the individual or team to perform a "task" versus bringing back an item. Examples of this might be singing a song out loud or using a camera to take pictures of things on the list. The goal is to race against competitors to retrieve the items first, as well as doing it in the shortest amount of time.

Education and Learning:

• Internet scavenger hunts are becoming more common for educational purposes.[1].

• Wikipedia has its own scavenger hunt.

Entertainment:

• One of the largest and most famous scavenger hunts is the University of Chicago Scavenger Hunt.

• The annual scavenger hunt of the University of Melbourne has 20 or more teams chasing about 600 items, 100 or more photos, and participating in events including Jelly Wrestling, Iron Gut and the infamous Long Drive.

Video-games

In the video-game industry the word scavenger hunt is sometimes attributed to 3D platform games that concentrate excessively on the collection of specific items in order to progress through the game. The scavenger hunt phenomena is widely attributed to the introduction of Super Mario 64, however, Rareware-titles such as the Banjo-Kazooie series and Donkey Kong 64 are considered to be the best examples of this.

History

The study of early human history, paleoanthropology, places the origins of man in Africa around 2 million years ago, though only 40,000 years ago for man anatomically-the-same as modern day humans. Since the beginning of man's existence, he has had to scavenge or hunt for food and other important items in order to survive. Over time, wandering food-gathering people began to settle down and become stationary food-producing people, thus followed towns, villages, and whole civilizations. The need for scavenging changed into a need for producing, but the concept of scavenger hunting never faded from civilization completely. The game of scavenger hunting is a simulation of what was once an important and necessary work in order for the human race to survive.

References

• Why Use Scavenger Hunts?, Spartanburg School District 3.

• Western Civilizations - Their History and Their Culture, Lerner Meacham Burns, Eleventh Edition, W W Norton & Company, NY, London, Chapter 1.