Geometry Scavenger Hunt: Angles and Shapes, Ages 10 to 12

Most geometry scavenger hunts online are printable worksheets: students walk around with a sheet, tick off shapes, and you check every sheet afterwards. This one does the checking for you. The steps appear one at a time on each team’s phone or tablet, the students take a photo of each shape they find, and the next step only opens when the photo shows the right thing or the puzzle answer is correct.

How the angles scavenger hunt works

The story is simple. Professor Wonky, the world’s worst shape inspector, has written a report that says the classroom has no right angles, no parallel lines and no proper shapes, just blobs. Each team is a Shape Squad, and its job is to collect the evidence and prove him wrong.

The first step gives the rules: stay together, take turns holding the phone, only go where the teacher says, ask before moving anything that is not yours, and keep faces out of every photo. Hands and arms are fine. Every photo step asks students to point the camera at a desk, a wall or the floor, and the photo check is set to ask for a new photo if a face is clearly in it.

Teams do not all play the steps in the same order. The hunt has three orders and gives them to teams in turn, so teams do not crowd the same object at the same time. In every order the case file comes first, the easy right angle photo comes second, the hardest puzzle comes seventh, and the ending comes last.

At the end, each team taps Finish Hunt and walks to you to show its final screen. A perfect team scores 160 points. You pick the winner: the first team to show you 160 points. The leaderboard on the phones is not used for this.

The ten steps: angles, lines, 2D and 3D shapes

This is the first of the three orders. The other two use the same steps, with the middle ones moved around.

1. The Blob Report. Professor Wonky’s Blob Report and the team rules. No points.
2. Find a square corner. Find a square corner, like the corner of a sheet of paper, and photograph it close up. A book, a table, a door, a window or a tile all work. 10 points.
3. The missing angle. The three angles inside a triangle always add up to 180 degrees, and the step says so. The professor’s triangle has one right angle and one angle of 30 degrees. How big is the third angle? The answer is 60 degrees, because 90 + 30 + 60 = 180. It is chosen from four options: 30, 60, 90 or 150 degrees. Each wrong option is a common mistake: 150 forgets the right angle, 90 counts it twice, and 30 copies the angle that was given. 20 points.
4. Lines that never meet. Photograph two parallel lines: two straight lines side by side that stay the same distance apart and never meet. The two long edges of a ruler, the lines on lined paper or the shelves of a bookcase all work. 20 points.
5. Make a shape riddle. The team chooses a classroom object and writes two short clues using two different shape words, such as rectangle, circle, curved or corner, without naming the object. The step gives an example. Students keep their riddle for a guessing game at the end. 20 points.
6. Make a narrow V. Put two pencils, pens or crayons on a desk with their tips touching, making an angle smaller than a square corner. One teammate arranges them and another photographs them straight down. A diagram shows the acute angle. No faces. 20 points.
7. Wonky’s rectangle. The hardest step. A rectangle has a perimeter of 24 units, and one side is 8 units long. What is its area? The answer is 32 square units. Opposite sides are equal, so two sides of 8 use 16 of the 24 units. That leaves 8 for the other two sides, so each is 4. The area is 8 x 4 = 32. Common wrong answers are 64 (8 x 8) and 16 (8 + 8). This step has three hints. 30 points.
8. Two solid shapes. Find a cylinder (straight sides and a flat circle at each end), such as a water bottle, a glue stick or a pen, and a cuboid (a box shape, also called a rectangular prism), such as a book, a pencil case or a box. Put them side by side in one photo. 20 points.
9. Count the edges. Pick up any box. An edge is a line where two faces meet. How many edges does it have? The answer is 12: 4 round the top, 4 round the bottom and 4 going up and down. Students type the number, and “12”, “twelve” and “12 edges” are all accepted. The usual wrong answers are 8 (they counted corners) and 6 (they counted faces). 20 points.
10. Case closed. The professor tears up his report and goes off to buy a protractor. The team taps Finish Hunt and walks to you. No points.

Every step except the first and the last has a hint button. Diagrams support the triangle, narrow V and rectangle puzzles. The puzzles have more than one hint: two for the missing angle, two for the edges and three for the rectangle. After some steps, a short note from the case file appears, such as “Evidence logged: parallel lines, and they still have not met.”

What the teacher prepares (about 15 minutes, the day before)

1. Copy the template with the button on this page, then release it. You do not need to change a word.
2. Try it yourself with the test run button in the builder, on a school tablet or laptop on the school Wi-Fi. Some school filters block the site or the photo uploads, and it is better to find out the day before. A test run does not use any of your free phones.
3. Look around the room once. Make sure there is at least one box (a tissue box, a pencil case, any cardboard box) and one cylinder (a water bottle, a glue stick, a pen) that students can reach without opening cupboards. Each team also needs two pencils, pens or crayons and access to lined paper.
4. Decide where teams may go: just the room, or the room plus a corridor you can see.
5. Plan the teams and devices. Teams of 3 or 4, one phone or tablet each. Each hunt can be played on 5 phones a month for free, and every class that plays this hunt in the same month shares those 5. A full class, or several classes, needs a phone pack bought before the lesson. Otherwise, make bigger teams.

How to run the lesson

1. Put students into teams of 3 or 4 first. Each team picks a name that is a colour or an animal, never their own names.
2. Then show the code. Only the student holding each team’s device scans it. Every device that joins uses one phone from the hunt’s allowance.
3. Say the rules out loud: stay where I can see you, take turns holding the phone, ask before you move anything, and no faces in any photo.
4. Tell them the teams get the steps in different orders, so following the team next to them does not help.
5. If more than 7 teams play, start half of them one minute later, so the first photo checks do not all arrive at the same moment. Give the later group that minute back when you compare who finished first.
6. When a team finishes, it taps Finish Hunt and shows you its final screen. The first team to show 160 points wins. Teams that finish early write two more shape riddles on paper.
7. Call time when the last team is back. Nobody is timed out, so a team still playing can finish and show its screen.
8. End with the guessing game: each team reads its shape riddle and the class guesses the object. If a team has forgotten its riddle, you can read it from the player answers in the hunt’s results in the builder.

A quick team finishes in about 15 minutes and a slow team in about 30. With the riddle game at the end, the whole activity fills about 25 to 40 minutes of a lesson.

Make it yours

Everything in the template can be changed in the builder before you release it, by hand or by typing the change you want in plain language. The most useful change is the level of the puzzles. For a younger class, the missing angle question can become “which of these is a right angle”, and the rectangle can ask only for the perimeter. For an older class, you can ask about angles on a straight line or the volume of a cuboid. The photo steps and the story can stay as they are.

If you change a puzzle, also change its answer and its hints. If you change the points on any step, change the 160 in the last step too, because that is the number students show you to win.

Questions teachers ask

How do you do a geometry scavenger hunt in a classroom? Put students in teams of 3 or 4, give each team one phone or tablet, and let them search the room for shapes and angles. In this hunt, teams photograph a right angle, parallel lines, an acute angle made with two pencils, and a cylinder next to a cuboid, then solve three puzzles. The phone checks each answer, so you can watch the room instead of marking sheets.

What angles can kids find at school? Right angles are everywhere: the corners of books, paper, desks, doors, windows and whiteboards. Acute angles are harder to find, so this hunt asks students to make one with two pencils, pens or crayons on a desk.

What math scavenger hunt works for ages 10 to 12? One that uses what students already know: right angles, parallel lines, 3D shape names, the edges of a box, and the perimeter and area of a rectangle. The one step that goes further, the angles of a triangle adding up to 180 degrees, gives the rule in the question, so students only need to know that a right angle is 90 degrees.

What if a team gets stuck on a puzzle? Point them to the hint button first. Each puzzle has two or three hints, and the rectangle hints walk through the whole calculation. On the two puzzles where students type a number, a team can see the answer after five wrong tries and carry on.

Do students need their own phones or an app? No. One phone or tablet per team is enough, and school devices are fine. The hunt opens in the web browser from a link or a code. Only the teacher who copies the template needs an account. The devices need an internet connection, because the answers are checked online.

How many teams can play for free? Each hunt can be played on 5 phones a month for free, and every class that plays it in the same month shares those 5. With teams of 4, that covers about 20 students. A full class or several classes need a phone pack bought before the lesson.