This week Kids Tech Club did a QR code scav­enger hunt and cre­ated QR codes to make their own for library patrons. If you are in the area, they’d love it if you come do their scav­enger hunt. The first clue is above (and on the Kids Tech Club page). The clues will be in place Octo­ber 21 — Novem­ber 20.

I played around with a few QR code gen­er­a­tors. I used Kawai QR-Code Gen­er­a­tor to cre­ate some. It was really sim­ple to use and can cre­ate codes based on text as well as urls. A fea­ture I liked is that the source code for embed­ding the QR code into a blog is pro­vided. Google url short­ener and QR code gen­er­a­tor keeps track of how many times peo­ple actu­ally read the QR code so I used that for some as well so we’ll have a feel for whether or not peo­ple actu­ally try our scav­enger hunt. You must be logged in to your Google account to access the QR code gen­er­a­tor portion.

I used a library iPad and bor­rowed from col­leagues. The kids knew we would be doing this so one girl brought her father’s smart­phone as well. The QR Reader I put on our iPad is Red­Laser. It works really well and detects the codes from imper­fect angles as well as a vari­ety of light­ing (although we had prob­lems scan­ning the code on a shiny audio­book case). Don’t have a smart­phone or tablet com­puter? You can read QR codes on a com­puter if you have a web cam­era. I have Quick­Mark installed on my lap­top and it works well for both read­ing and cre­at­ing QR codes. So now this is installed at the Children’s Desk so all patrons can par­tic­i­pate in the scav­enger hunt the kids made. Mul­ti­ple codes are placed in CD envelopes at the clue loca­tions so they can bring them up to the desk to scan if needed.

The Library’s Flickr account was a great place to start for some pho­tos of places in the build­ing like the Book Nook. Other clues led them to books in the stacks. For these I had hoped to use the series’ web­sites, but so many of the sites for really pop­u­lar series are flash-based and there­fore wouldn’t dis­play on the iPads. Usu­ally the authors were pop­u­lar enough that they knew exactly where to find the books, but some­times they had to use the library cat­a­log to guide them to the right place. They had six clues which had them wan­der­ing around the library look­ing for areas of the col­lec­tion and build­ing. The final clue led them to the Children’s Desk where they received a com­pass tat­too (SRP leftovers).