Scavenger hunt helps MAP juniors explore SF

On March 23, around 50 juniors in the Media Arts Program (MAP) traveled to San Francisco to participate in a scavenger hunt funded by the MAP Boosters and organized by MAP coordinator Kerry Mohnike.

“It’s an opportunity for the kids to learn a lot of different skills, such as using public transportation, budgeting money, and finding things,” Mohnike said. “They visit important historical and literary sites.”

Students received a list of 30 history-related items to find in various parts of San Francisco, taking students from the Financial District to Chinatown and even to North Beach.

“We ran around San Francisco like lost puppies,” junior Tavius Woods said.

Once students found a location specified on the list, they had to take a photo of themselves at the site. Sometimes, however, students were asked to take a picture with a specific object or to even buy the item using the $40 allotted to each student.

“We got to go on the trip totally free; in fact, we were told not to bring any money because we weren’t allowed to pay for anything ourselves,” junior Elyse Berlinberg said. “Part of the challenge of the trip was budgeting.”

Another type of challenge was learning to work in groups to find the items on the list before time ran out.

“You learn that there is strength in numbers,” junior Henry Wei said. “As a group, you had to decide on routes, identify objects, or sometimes realize that the group is going in the wrong direction.”

To ensure that students were safe in the big city, a chaperone followed each group on the scavenger hunt.

“It was still up to us to plan out transportation, timing and money,” Berlinberg said. “We constantly used technology to prevent us from getting lost, which went well with the theme of the media arts program.”

Some notable tasks included finding the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory, the UN charter, an Italian flag, interviewing workers in each district and running up Telegraph Hill.

“I learned a lot about the history of San Francisco. It was great to put the actual place to what we'd learned about in history,” Berlinberg said. “It was a fantastic trip.”