Description

BreadCrumb is a simple dashboard for creating and managing scavenger hunts. It allows anyone to dispatch scavenger hunts to participants using just their phone numbers.

I thought that it was important to keep the barrier for participating in hunts as low as possible, so I used Twilio’s SMS API to coordinate hunts after they were created in the dashboard. In other words, potential users can participate in scavenger hunts without creating an account.

The Problem

I have always loved scavenger hunts. In high school, I would create them regularly them for friends and family. I thought that it would be fun to have a tool that made creating scavenger hunts as easy as writing prompts into an editor and then automating participants’ progress using texts.

I noticed that there weren’t very many tools to manage interactive SMS-based scavenger hunts and thought that there were educational applications that would be interesting.

Planning

I knew that I wanted to build a tool for a variety of users, each with their own needs:

• Teachers wanting to make their lessons more engaging
• Friends wanting to make a loved one’s birthday unique
• College RA’s wanting to make their freshman orientation weeks more interactive

I also knew that an answer that was incredibly close, but not an exact match would ruin the experience for users. So, I used the Natural NPM package to create my own fuzzy comparison (allowing “Mario’s” as an answer for “Mario’s Pizza”).

User Stories

Here are some user stories that motivated the website.

Karen

• Karen (45) is an elementary school teacher planning a school field trip for her students to a natural history museum
• As an experienced teacher, she wants to use a new technology to apply her existing knowledge, so that her students will engage at the museum
• Because she is not as familiar with technology as some of her co-workers, she wants to be able to use the app without too much technical knowledge

Amad

• Amad (22) is a young man dating for the first time in college
• As a new boyfriend, he wants to use an app that enables scavenger hunts, so he can create a unique anniversary present for his boyfriend
• Becuase he is familiar with technology, he wants to be able to modify the hunt on the fly across multiple platforms

Outcomes

After finishing BreadCrumb, I demoed it to 20+ participants by hiding 100 stickers around DevMountain’s campus and creating a scavenger hunt that led participants to them. I was also awarded Best Overall / Most Shippable for my cohort.

Creating this full stack website was an incredible learning experience.

Next Steps

• Rebuild the front-end as a React-Native app
• Support image uploads as well as text responses for the hunts