How to make a QR code scavenger hunt for your classroom

A QR code scavenger hunt is the version of this activity that actually works inside a school. No signal in the corridor, no location services, no student walking into a doorframe while staring at a map. You print some codes, tape them to things, and students go and find them.

There are two ways to build one. The first is free and entirely manual, and it is what most guides describe. The second takes about ten minutes. Both are below, honestly, because the manual one is genuinely fine for a single lesson.

The by-hand method

This is the route you will find in most tutorials, and it does work.

1. Write your stops first, on paper. Ten stops is a lot for one lesson. Six is usually right. For each one, decide the place the code goes and what students have to do when they get there.
2. Make a page for each stop. A QR code can only hold a short piece of text or a web address, so if your clue is longer than a sentence you need somewhere to put it. Most teachers use a Google Doc per stop, set to anyone with the link.
3. Generate a code for each page. Paste the address into any free QR generator, download the image, and label the file so you know which stop it is. Do this once per stop.
4. Put them in a document and print. One code per page if students are working in groups, four to a page if you want them small enough to hide.
5. Tape them up before the lesson, and write yourself a list of where they all are, because you will forget.

What this method cannot do is check anything. A student scans a code, reads the clue, and you have no idea whether they answered it, guessed it, or copied it from the group next to them. If that is fine for your lesson, stop here, you have what you need.

The faster method

If you want the hunt to actually check the answers, and you do not want to make a document per stop, use a builder that generates the codes as part of the hunt.

In HedgeHunt that looks like this:

1. Describe the hunt in a sentence. Something like “a hunt around a Year 5 classroom that revises the water cycle, six stops”. The AI drafts the stops, the clues and the questions, and you rewrite the parts that are wrong. You can also skip the AI and build every stop yourself.
2. Set a stop to be a QR mission. A code appears for that stop straight away. There is a download button under it that gives you a printable card.
3. Print them and tape them up. Same taping as before, minus the document per stop and minus the generator.
4. Hand the class one link, or one QR code to join. Students open it in the browser on the phone or tablet they already have. Nothing installs, and nobody signs up for anything, so there is no student account and no student email involved.
5. Play it yourself first. Start a test run and walk the room with your own phone, exactly as students will see it. Free, and worth the four minutes.

The difference that matters is what happens when a student scans a code. The hunt knows they reached that stop, marks it done, and moves them on to the next thing. If the stop asks a question, it checks the answer. You get a class that is genuinely being kept honest by the activity instead of by you walking around the room.

Things worth knowing before you print

Regenerating a code kills the printed one. There is a regenerate button next to every code, for when a sheet goes missing off a wall and you would rather not have that code working any more. Use it and the paper copies of that stop stop working immediately. That is the point of it, but do not press it the morning of the lesson.

You can hide something behind the scan. A stop can reveal a word, a number or a message once the code is scanned, which is how you build the kind of hunt where the last stop needs four letters collected from the first four.

One phone per pair is normal. Very few classes have a device each, and none of this needs one. Pairs work better anyway, because they argue about the answer.

Indoors, use QR codes and skip location entirely. Location stops are for outdoors, where GPS is reliable. Inside a building it is not, and a QR code taped to the right door does the same job perfectly.

A shape that works for the first week of term

If you are doing this in September with a class that does not know the building yet, put the codes on the places they will need and nobody shows them: the nurse, the canteen, the library, the office, the lost property box. Ask a question at each one that they can only answer by being there and reading the sign. It takes half an hour and it saves you a term of being asked where things are.