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ClassTools Premium membership gives access to all templates, no advertisements, personal branding and many other benefits!
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1. Arrange students into groups. Each group needs at least ONE person who has a mobile device.
2. If their phone camera doesn't automatically detect and decode QR codes, ask students to
4. Cut them out and place them around your class / school.
1. Give each group a clipboard and a piece of paper so they can write down the decoded questions and their answers to them.
2. Explain to the students that the codes are hidden around the school. Each team will get ONE point for each question they correctly decode and copy down onto their sheet, and a further TWO points if they can then provide the correct answer and write this down underneath the question.
3. Away they go! The winner is the first team to return with the most correct answers in the time available. This could be within a lesson, or during a lunchbreak, or even over several days!
4. A detailed case study in how to set up a successful QR Scavenger Hunt using this tool can be found here.
Question | Answer |
| 1. A.Sally is visiting Lake Tahoe at ~6,000 feet and loves being among the conifer trees. They smell so good! It’s a bright sunny day and many people are driving around the scenic lake loop. Sally notices a beautiful blue haze filling the valleys. The more Sally runs up and down the trail, the worse Sally’s lungs feel. Sally gets an asthma attack. Luckily a friendly rabbit offers to share its inhaler with SallY | Sally Photochemical smog / tropospheric ozone VOCs from terpenes of conifers and car exhaust Sunshine Respiratory problem: asthma attack |
| 2. B. Sky has been having trouble with her natural gas heater. It keeps burning through natural gas, but it’s not keeping the house as warm as it used to. Sky’s dog, Ford, wakes her up in the night. Ford is freaking out. Sky has a splitting headache. (Sky doesn’t know it, but oxygen isn’t bonding well to her hemoglobin.) Ford insists they leave the house. Sky walks into the front yard. As they leave the house, her headache clears. If Ford hadn’t woken Sky up, Sky would probably have died. Sky looks at reviews of [pollutant] detectors and installs one in her home. Ford gets a big steak. | Carbon monoxide |
| 3. C. Bai Chunxue, the head of respiratory medicine at Shanghai’s Zhongshan Hospital, sees this ever worsening haze as the upcoming cause of many deaths. To protect himself, Chunxue wears a facemask on his walk to work (less than one mile) and has moved his apartment to the 37th floor (as this pollution is the worst between 10th and 20th floors). He worries about dust that is fine enough to get through the face mask and settle in his lungs and heart. He advocates that the Chinese government close or relocate factories close to Beijing. Another doctor in Northern China just diagnosed youngest person to be diagnosed with lung cancer at just eight years old. Someone else, Zhong Nanshan, found that cardiovascular failure increased 1.28% for every increase of 10 micrograms of [mystery pollutant] per meter3. | Ozone / Particulate matter 2.5 |
| 4. D. Gaia’s house has an old shed in back. Sometimes, Gaia and her sisters will go play in the shed. There is paint peeling off the walls. Gaia and her sisters have fun peeling the paint of the walls. One of them notice that the paint tastes sweet. The kids take turns peeling off the longest strips possible and eating them. When Gaia returns to school that fall, she has trouble focusing. She gets irritated more easily and no one wants to be her friend. Gaia can’t process words like she used to, and she has trouble reading chapter books. | Lead |
| 5. E. There was a forest fire on the other side of the ridge from Philly’s pond. Philly did see the lightening and felt the rain pattering on the surface of his lake. Now the water feels terrible. Mucus forms in Philly’s gills and it's harder to breathe. Philly’s cells don’t maintain their electrolyte and fluid balance. Philly’s fertilized fish eggs don’t hatch. | Nitrogen oxides (though could also be sulfur dioxide) |
| 6. F. Looking to support local fossil fuel companies, a national government removes regulations requiring that coal power plants have scrubbers. The coal mine has also used up most the the anthracitic coal source, and has begun mining peat and lignite coal. People downwind of the coal power plant get respiratory illnesses and neurological damage. There are many pollutants involved. List all that could apply. | Coal: sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, particulate matter, lead, mercury |
| 7. G. Prudence lives in rural Zambia. She cooks most of her family’s food over a brazier. Sometimes she can afford charcoal, but mostly she uses dried cow manure, leaves of banana plants, and sticks. On nice days, she cooks outside. During the rainy season, she sometimes cooks inside. She bends low over the pot to taste food, make sure it doesn’t burn, and blow on the coals to restoke them. The smoke from the fire makes her eyes water and her lungs burn. While she cooks, she keeps her infants strapped to her back and her young children nearby so she can keep an eye on them. There are two major pollutants that will cause her and her children to have respiratory issues, headaches, dizziness, nausea. Both of these can cause death, especially to infants and children under 5 years old. | Particulate matter and carbon monoxide |
| 8. H. Amal moved to North Dakota and is shopping for a home. He finds a home with a big basement where he can hold foosball parties and store his collection of airline barf bags. (He is trying to beat the world record to 6,290 air sickness bags.) The house is cheap. The owner passed away from lung cancer. Amal’s real estate agent suggests he test the house for [pollutant]. Once Amal does, he finds that levels are high. If he buys the house, he must seal cracks in the basement and increase ventilation in the house. So much for foosball parties. | Rn-222 |
| 9. I. Fremont High School was built in the 1960’s. The insulation in the building has gotten old, and it was time to be replaced. However, the school district hired the cheapest contractors, without examining their credentials. Years later, many people who at attended or worked at the school had lung cancer and other respiratory diseases. | Asbestos |
| 10. J. Frieda loves to run. When she moved out to the country, she discovered that the railroad tracks make a great running trail (when the trains aren’t going through). On hot days, there is a cool mirage effect where the air above the tracks distorts the light. Over the summer, Frieda’s asthma gets worse, and she starts to have a burning sensation in her eyes. | Formaldehyde (VOC) |
| 11. K. The workers at WeMakeMoney have a new office building. WeMakeMoney saved money by buying and building on a cheap empty lot near the freeway intersections. WeMakeMoney also decided to be super environmentally-friendly and save money by tightly insulating the building. This way they can reduce less natural gas is burned to warm and cool the building. To not lose time, WeMakeMoney moved its workers in just after they had laid now new carpeting and installed new furniture. The building still had that “new car” smell. The workers were ungrateful. They didn’t appreciate they nice new building. Instead, they complained about headaches, nausea, throat and eye irritation, and fatigue. Worker productivity dropped, costing WeMakeMoney much more than they saved. | Sick Building Syndrome |
| 12. L. The Great Smog of London, also known as the Big Smoke happened from December 5-9, 1952. A period of cold weather combined with certain wind conditions meant that airborne pollutants from burning coal were trapped around the city. It reduced visibility, even inside. It was so thick, people referred to it as “pea soup.” Government medical reports found that 4,000 people died as a direct results of the smog and 10,000 more people were made sick by its effect on their respiratory tracts. This disaster lead to support for passage of air pollution protections in the United Kingdom. | Sulfurous smog / London-type smog / gray smog |
| 13. M. On May 18, 1980, Mount St. Helens (a volcano in Washington) erupted, throwing huge ash clouds into the air. In the weeks after the eruption, there was an increase of patients to local hospitals who had asthma and bronchitis. Researchers, such as Baxter et al. (1983) found that the increased exacerbating factor was the airborne suspended [pollutant] after the eruption. | Particles (seems to have a bigger effect on respiratory health than other pollutants from volcanoes) |
| 14. N. Though we now see large cities across Southern and Eastern Asia as living with unbearable pollution, we forget that we experienced similar levels of pollution in the United States. In LA in WWII, the brown-colored smog grew so dense, people thought that Japanese had attacked them with chemicals. Many people who grew up there reported that it “hurt to breathe” and would get teary eyes on bad days. It was hard to get air pollution legislation in California and the U.S. because the car industry didn’t want to be blamed and people were scared that new catalytic converters that removed [pollutant] from emissions would make cars too expensive. (Plus people didn’t understand the the connection because auto emissions were clear and the smog was brown.) Haagen-Smit, a biologist studying flavor of pineapples, found the connection. But, the oil and automobile industries funded the Stanford Research Institute to discredit Haagen-Smit. At one point, someone offered to disprove Haagen-Smit’s findings by voluntarily sitting in his plexiglass smog chamber. This person got bronchitis. Haagen-Smit continued his research so that by the 1950’s the connection was clear. Activists groups sprang up and clamored for pollution control legislation. From this and other pollution crises, the Clean Air Act was born. | LA residents, 1950s - 1960s NOx and VOCs leading to photochemical smog / tropospheric ozone Brown-colored smog linked to auto emissions Hurt to breathe |
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