I have been doing this event anually for seven years now and it keeps getting bigger so I guess the kids like it. The youth are broken up into teams of 4 – 5 kids and they are are given sheets with riddles and a banana. They have an hour and a half to solve the riddles which tell them what they need to measure with the bananas. Points are given if they have the right thing and the right measurement but mostly for the right thing.
Set up is also quite fun too. I use it as an opportunity for a one on one meeting with one of the kids. We go out to the mall, luckily I live in Edmonton with the World’s Largest Mall where there is no shortage of stuff to use. I use some obvious stuff some hard stuff and some fun stuff (one year I had them measure a urinal, I made sure each team had a couple of boys in it). You can choose anywhere that there is a lot of stuff you can use. Even a neighborhood, train station or whatever.
My chosen assistant and I go and find stuff and measure them with a tape measure, an infared tape measrure works really well if you have one. Then we chose a theme for the riddles to follow. I.E. a scatter brained tourist trying to remember his trip to the mall and can’t figure out what he saw but he discribes it in a weird way. Then we do the riddles usually about 15-18 will give about an hour and a half challenge dpending on how big your area is and how hard your clues are.
I buy the bananas a few days ahead of time to make sure they get nice and ripe. And so you can measure them and convert your answers to bananas. We give bonus points to the groups that eat the banana after but I should say drink it because they turn liquidy after all the abuse.
During the event me and the assistant hang out and walk around the whole hunt and sell clues to people and also buy prizes for the top three teams.
The groups have to be back at the meeting point on time or the get docked points for each minute late. Then we go to a restaurant for snacks – make reservations ahead of time. During which my assistant and I score the teams and then announce the winners and hand out the prizes.
E-mail me using the email address above and I can send you some samples of what we have done in the past.