What Is Goosechase And How Can Educators Use It? What's New?

Goosechase is a scavenger hunt creation tool that has many resources and templates geared specifically toward educators, and features a version that is free for teachers.

Using Goosechase, educators can create a variety of scavenger hunts built around class material and lessons. From word games to challenges that involve solving math problems, there are lots of options.

Using Goosechase can also foster teambuilding and be built around friendly competition. The tool is designed to get kids actively learning and applying critical thinking skills as they complete scavenger hunts in collaboration with their peers. This is one of those education apps that involves screens but has students up and active and using their screens in more productive ways.

Here is everything you need to know about teaching with Goosechase.

What is Goosechase and What Does it Provide Teachers?  

Goosechase is a scavenger hunt app created Andrew Cross, who previously worked in Product Design for Apple. It’s popular with educators and beyond.

Outside of education, the app is used during conferences and orientations, and by corporations looking to encourage team building. The education version provides teachers with the ability to gamify their lesson plans while facilitating active learning, collaboration and, when appropriate, friendly competition.

Students can compete individually or on teams, and the scavenger hunts can be timed and entirely text-based or can require students to travel to certain GPS coordinates to complete missions. Goosechase missions can require students to take a picture of or make a video at a specific location. For instance, a vocabulary lesson could use Goosechase to require students to visit the school library and look up specific words in the dictionary. A mission for high school students might ask them to find a teacher to interview who is not teaching a class and direct them to ask a specific question related to the day’s lesson.

Goosechase can also be used on field trips. It can be an interesting way to have students explore a historic, site museum, park etc.

How Does GooseChase Work? 

To set up your Goosechase account, go to Goosechase.com/edu and click on the sign up for free button. You’ll be prompted to enter a username, email, and password, plus include details about your school and district.

Once your account is confirmed, you can start building scavenger hunts. You can learn the basics of how to do this with Goosechase’s Getting Started Guide and also choose from scores of already existing games Goosechase’s Game Library. These games are categorized by grade level and subject. You can also search the Game Library by game type. Options include indoor, outdoor, virtual, and group games.

Designing scavenger hunts is easy. You can create simple missions that resemble a more traditional quiz or get more creative in your use of the tool. No matter what type of scavenger hunt you have in mind, odds are there is something in the Game Library that is somewhat similar and could possibly serve as a template or give you ideas on how to build your own game.

What's New In Goosechase?

Goosechase is constantly tweaking the platform, and regularly posts the most recent product updates here.

A few recent noteworthy fixes/updates:

• Goosechase now plays in any browser, no download needed, so users can join and play straight from a web browser or on any device with nothing to install. Camera Missions, GPS check-ins, team play, and joining without an account all work just like in the app. Push notifications are also now available on the browser version.
• Workspace owners can now invite up to 100 people at once by pasting a list of email addresses into Studio, instead of adding one by one. 
• New Educator sign-ups now start with a fresh workspace name instead of defaulting to the school listed on the Educator Profile.
• Creators are now able to remove individual participants from teams directly in Studio to better control team management.
• The Studio Activity Feed now checks for new submissions every 30 seconds and features a “Load new submissions” button to keep up with real-time activity.
• The Stats page has been redesigned, including: streamlined charts for better readability at scale; refreshed top-level stats and bar charts with improved data visualization; a new Participants Table for participant-level engagement insights; a new Submissions Table for deeper submission analysis; and individual contributor–level insights across participant and submission data.
• Android users can now capture, upload, and resubmit videos smoothly—no workarounds required.

What Are Some Goosechase's Best Features? 

Using the app, students can:

• Enter GPS coordinates to show they arrived at a specific location 
• Take photos to demonstrate they found the object of the scavenger hunt
• Record videos with audio to demonstrate learning in various ways 
• Answer simple or complex questions through teamwork 
• Enjoy an escape room or video game like experience while learning class material 

How Much Does Goosechase Edu Cost?  

Goosechase has a free version that is available to educators. You can only have three individual participants but that allows you to have three teams working on a scavenger hunt at time, which can be ample.

Schools and nonprofits can reach out directly for pricing for more robust features. Goosechase also allows the purchase of single-event experiences, which start at $99. This works if you have class budget for a field trip or want to use Goosechase for a special event.

What Are The Best Goosechase Tips & Tricks 

The Goosechase Games Library

The Goosechase Games Library has thousands of missions that you can use in your classes or modify to better suit your needs. These scavenger hunts are broken down by subject, grade level, and game type. You can search for team or individual games, as well as by categories such as “indoors,” “field trip,” and even “staff team building & PD.”

Have Students Record and Take Pictures

Goosechase allows students to earn points in various games by taking pictures and videos of specific locations or objects. Teachers can do a lot with this capability, such as having students interview their classmates or a teacher of another class.

Use Goosechase to Encourage Students to Visit the School Library

Educators can use Goosechase to send students on library scavenger hunts, in which they visit the library and look up a specific passage in a specific book, or document their research process for an assignment in any topic.

Use Goosechase for Math

Goosechase can also be used in math and science classes. For example, design a geography-themed scavenger hunt for various shapes with younger students. Older math students might get points or rewards for solving complex equations, and there are also many ways to incorporate various coding challenges into scavenger hunts.

Use Goosechase On a Field Trip

On trips to museums or other sites, Goosechase can be used as a fun alternative to a reaction paper. Pick key objects or areas of the museum you want students to visit, then require that they snap a photograph and or provide brief written responses as they go.