Sarah and Keane

For the past three years, while living in Wheaton, me and a group of friends would celebrate April Adventure League, a month filled with adventures, outings, and general tomfoolery. While the tradition has continued (and grown) back in the States, I thought it would be a good time to bring a little bit of that fun to Germany. So in light of that idea, I created an April Adventure League for my small group of Freshman guys: a month-long treasure hunt filled with clues, riddles, code breaking, and geo-caching. (In full disclosure, this was all heavily inspired by Josh Okerman.)

All of the clues together.

After the students returned from spring break, each of them was greeted with an envelope in their mailbox containing a name tag with gibberish written on it, and a welcome letter written in code. They worked together to discover that each of their name tags contained a piece of the code and, by putting together what they could figure out from their name tag, they were able to decode the entire note.

The first clue: name tag and coded message.

After they decoded the first message they learned that every Tuesday and Thursday a new clue would be released to a certain number of them. All the clues required everyone to work together.

It was fun to see different students get excited about solving the clues they were given. We did get in some trouble when some students working together solved a riddle in the middle of Math class and shouted out the answer.

Some clues were pretty straight forward, but others got increasingly complicated.

These were found hidden around the school, when combined they formed one clue.

As the month came to an end, they had to find the hidden treasure, which contained an immediate reward — and the promise of a future pizza party.

One problem we ran into was the fact that so many of the guys in our small group are constantly in sports. This meant that hunting for the treasure fell heavily onto one dedicated student (pictured here). He loves riddles and puzzles, so he was the perfect point man for this entire April Adventure League. The treasure was found just in time for the pizza party (and also before anyone in Kandern saw it and called the bomb squad because it sure looks like a  suspicious package). Congratulations to my guys for completing their first ever April Adventure League!