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The World's Largest Scavenger Hunt

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the hi-cassandra dept.

illuminatedwax writes "Every spring, University of Chicago students attempt to cast off their bookish tendencies and hold the world's largest scavenger hunt. Now, the event has been filmed by the student film group, Fire Escape, as a documentary, and is being sold on DVD and VHS from Periphrastic Films. The film follows the various teams and their effort to procure the off-the-wall 300+ items. For those who haven't heard of the University of Chicago Scav Hunt, its biggest claim to fame is from the 1999 hunt, when students built a working breeder reactor. Items during the 2002 Scav Hunt featured in the film include "Passports stamped by all three axes of evil", building "terrorist base camps" on the University quads, and students competing in a game show-style contest, featuring a DDR contest, and trivia like "Digits of Pi" and "Taylor Series." The Scav Hunt lists can be found here, and the 2002 list here."

5 of 198 comments (clear)

  1. Reactor by Gutboy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    when students built a working breeder reactor.

    According to the article, they build a "working nuclear reactor", an fairly easy task if you know how, not a "working breeder reactor", a very complicated task requiring multi-million dollar processing plants and weapons grade plutonium.

  2. Re:Its crap like this... by nightsweat · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Yeah,you're probably right. All we did was turn out a manufacturing Company President, two VP's of IT, three medical doctors, a chemist, a writer, and a statistics professor from our core group of friends there.

    --

    the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
  3. Re:Its crap like this... by Chuckaluphagus · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I got a fantastic education at the University of Chicago, and the Scavenger Hunt was part of it. It teaches you how to be creative and practical, make quick decisions, and work well with a lot of other people. And it's fun.

    How in the world can you regard this as a bad thing? Hell, I'll pay more to let my children go to a college that has this sort of event.

  4. Re:Congress at Work by chipach · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The search results will time out...

    http://thomas.loc.gov/home/r107query.html
    Searc h for:
    Scavenger Hunt University of Chicago

    and then click on the first thing it returns (" DELETIONS OF SPONSERS..."). Then click Printer Friendly Display and search for Chicago...

  5. Re:Monumental waste... by Waffle+Iron · · Score: 3, Insightful
    it's turned a scavenger hunt from a fun afternoon activity with some purpose into a monumental waste of time, energy, and resources.

    Well, since the U of C has little chance of getting into a major bowl game or the final four, they've had to create their own way to waste monumental amounts of time energy, energy and resources.