Chrono Scout

Explore the history of your town through community scavenger hunts

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Inspiration

One of the most exciting experiences I looked forward to as a child was the Scavenger Hunt (Zoektocht) organized every year in De Panne, Belgium. During the summer, the city government would distribute huge numbers of pamphlets at the visitor center, with pictures of obscure landmarks or art from around the town. Every picture would have a question associated with it (like which street is this painting in? What's the color of the sidewalk near this statue?). If you answered every question correctly, you would receive a prize from the city government. Scavenger hunts are an awesome experience when visiting small towns like De Panne because they force you to go outside and look closely at details you may not usually pay attention to, and learn some history about the city/town along the way (hence the name, Chrono Scout). It's also a great group experience! But, unfortunately, this is not something I've seen yet in Colorado. And so, I decided to create a web app to remedy that and let cities and towns easily create these scavenger hunts.

What it does

The app makes it easy for towns to create scavenger hunts online, as well as for visitors or citizens to participate. The town needs only use a phone to take pictures of the associated landmarks, and the scavenger hunt is instantly posted in the easy-to-use web app!

How we built it

This was originally intented as an AR experience, but due to time constraints, I went with a more manual/traditional design. This meant a simple Svelte frontend with a NodeJS backend. I took advantage of some browser features to integrate photo taking into the web app. There's no database yet, unfortunately, everything is stored in memory and served when requested.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge I ran into was in trying to create the initial idea. I initially envisioned this as an AR app, which would guide people through the city on the scavenger hunt. This ended up being impractical, and I couldn't get the tracking to work with my SLAM framework. So I pivoted to this idea.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I'm mostly proud of the way this looks and the fact that I was able to pivot from my original idea, basically starting from scratch with only 4 hours remaining.

What we learned

I think I definitely learned that some scopes are simply too large for a hackathon, and what seemed feasible in the beginning was not so. I should've gone with this idea from the beginning, so that I could perhaps have polished a bit more.

What's next for Chrono Scout

I need to add a real database, and I would also like to see more security features, so that it becomes less easy to "cheat" and collect prizes if you've not completed every question. I also need to limit the number of guesses so that people will actually need to find what's in the scavenger instead of simply guessing.

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