Virtual scavenger hunt for the classroom: how to build one in 360

A virtual scavenger hunt is a tour through 360 photos with objects hidden around the scenes, and students have to find them all, helped by clues you scatter here and there. It’s the easiest immersive activity to build (about an hour once you have the photos), it works from third grade up, and it doesn’t need headsets: students play on the classroom display, on tablets or on Chromebooks and phones. Here’s how to build one with Andarama, plus eight ideas by grade level and subject.

If you want to build along as you read, the Andarama Aula trial is free for 14 days, no credit card required. (Full disclosure: Andarama is ours.)

Why it works

Looking for something hidden in an image you can spin around is inherently fun: you have to look up, behind, inside. If each object comes with a short explanation when you find it and there’s a visible counter showing “4 of 7,” motivation takes care of itself. Unlike a digital escape room, there are no puzzles that lock you in place: the tour is open, which makes it a better fit for younger students and for groups working at different speeds.

What you need

• 360 photos of three to six places: your school, a farmers market, a museum (Wikimedia Commons has freely licensed panoramas), the forest from your last field trip.
• A list of objects to find, with a clue and an explanation for each one.
• Andarama with the Treasure hotspot, which is built for exactly this: you place it in whichever scenes you want and the viewer keeps count of what’s been found.

Build it in six steps

1. Scenes

Create a tour, upload the photos and make one scene per place. Connect the scenes in the graph with two-way links so students can move back and forth freely; the “follow the path” arrival setting means that when students change scenes they arrive facing forward, as if they’d walked there.

2. Hide the treasures

Add one Treasure hotspot per object. By default it looks like a gem; to really hide it:

• Swap the icon for something that fits the scene (a key, a leaf, a star) or upload your own SVG.
• Remove the round background under “Style” and reduce the size.
• Put it somewhere students have to look for: up on a light fixture, down by a table leg, behind the door.

Three or four treasures per scene across five scenes is enough for a class period.

3. Put the explanation in the treasure itself

The goal isn’t just finding it; it’s learning something when you do. Each treasure has a reward field, a short Markdown text that appears when it’s found. Use it: “You found the astrolabe. Sailors used it to measure the height of the sun and work out their latitude.” If you need more room, a Text or Image hotspot next to it works as an info card. Each treasure also has a hint field: while a scene still has treasures to find, the counter at the top offers a Hint button that shows it without giving away where the object is.

4. Scatter the clues

Use Floating label hotspots with ambiguous hints (“someone kept secrets here” next to a drawer), Audio hotspots with a thirty-second message, or Image hotspots with a photo of the object students are looking for. Clues close to the object help younger kids; in middle and high school, one general clue per scene is better.

5. The final reward

Three ways, and you can combine them:

• The hunt’s own completion message: the notice the viewer shows for a few seconds when the last treasure is found. It’s the minimum and it goes by quickly, so pair it with one of the other two.
• A final quiz that can only be answered with what students learned from the treasures, with the PDF certificate turned on in the tour settings.
• A treasure chest that appears: instead of treasures, hide Action (variables) hotspots disguised as objects, each adding one to a variable, and a final hotspot with a visibility condition that shows up when the variable reaches the total. It’s the escape room mechanic, and you lose the automatic counter, so it’s only worth it with older students.

6. Preview, publish and share

Preview the whole tour, publish, and share the link or the QR code. Students don’t need an account to play: post the link in Google Classroom, Canvas or Moodle, or put the QR code on the board. The Aula plan for teachers costs $42 a year and covers five tours.

Eight ideas

Idea	Grade level	What’s hidden	What students learn
Animals of the forest	Grades 3-5	Animal silhouettes in photos from your field trip	Local wildlife, habitats
The farmers market	Grades 3-5	Seasonal produce at the stalls	Nutrition, where food comes from
Shape hunt	Grades 3-5	Triangles, circles and prisms in your school’s architecture	Geometry in the real world
Lab equipment	Middle school science	Lab gear with its name and use	Names, functions, lab safety
Museum word hunt	Middle school ELA	Key words hidden in the galleries; find them all and they form a sentence	Vocabulary, reading comprehension
La chasse au trésor	High school French or Spanish	Objects whose clue is only in the target language	Listening and reading comprehension
Parts of the cathedral	High school art history	Architectural elements in freely licensed panoramas of a cathedral	Art history vocabulary
Five hazards	CTE and workplace training	Hazards on a shop floor or in a workshop	Safety awareness; a format also used in corporate training

The language version has a built-in ally in Andarama: every scene and hotspot can be translated, so the same hunt can exist in two languages with a language switcher in the viewer.

Tips from actually playing it

• Keep the counter visible. It’s what holds the activity together. Tell students up front how many treasures there are.
• Not too easy, not impossible. A treasure nobody finds in five minutes is frustrating; adjust the size and the clue after your first test run.
• Small groups, one device per group. One student steers, one searches, one writes down what they learned.
• Wrap up together. Use the last ten minutes on the big screen: each group explains one treasure.
• Save it for next year. The tour stays built; you just swap the objects or add scenes.

With cardboard headsets

This is the perfect activity for trying out cardboard viewers: students search by looking around, and the viewer triggers treasures by gaze (a ring fills up while you hold your look on one). No other equipment needed. We wrote about when real headsets are worth it in VR in education without buying headsets, and if your hunt is really a trip to somewhere far away, our guide to virtual field trips has more ideas.

Start today

Three photos and six treasures are enough to play. Because students play without accounts and the analytics use no cookies, there’s no student login data to manage, which keeps conversations about student data privacy short. The program is open source and can also be installed for free on a school computer. Start your free Aula trial and have your first hunt ready by the end of a planning period.