World Thinking Day

On 22 February each year 10 million girls and young women and over one million adult volunteers celebrate World Thinking Day by doing activities and participating in advocacy campaigns.

At the end of last year, one of the Treasure Trails’ partners was approached by their local Girl Guiding Organisation and asked to come up with a game exploring the city of Gloucester that would be suitable for this year's Thinking Day.

The brief was to create something that would entertain between 200 and 300 girls aged between 5 and 14 along with their adult helpers and that something should take around an hour maximum.

How many girls?

David, the Trail writer and partner told us “entertaining 300 girls of varying ages meant we had to put our thinking caps on to devise a game that would work for a five year old as well as a 14 year old. Our standard Trails work for all the family, but we generally expect the family doing the Trail to have children aged 7 and upwards and our standard Trails generally take around 2 hours”.

After some discussion with the client, it was decided to keep the girls grouped according to their ages. There were four separate divisions involved and David came up with a design that meant the divisions would compete against each other. There would be separate games for the Rainbows, Brownies and Guides and the different age groups would work together at the end of their walk around Gloucester to figure out an overall answer. He divided Gloucester into three areas and devised a Treasure Trail around each area that was age appropriate. This meant 9 different Treasure Trails had to be completed by each division.

The beauty of this was that even with 300 girls out in Gloucester for an hour each group would be no larger than 6 and so everyone would get a chance to participate.

The design

The Trails designed for the younger girls, the Rainbows were all picture clues in the standard Treasure Trails format such as “Find the fancy gate in the picture. Add together the first two numbers of the date below it” and “Walk to the Cathedral entrance. This king is holding something in his left hand which you can't see in the picture. It begins and ends with the same two letters.”

The Brownies were challenged with a map of the area and on the map were various places each with a letter. They also had a selection of photos of various places around the area and they had to read the map and match the photo to the lettered place.

The Guides’ challenge was similar to our public Treasure Trails with reasonably straight forward clues like “At a small crane nearby, find out where John Henderson may have come from. This is a place you can cross off your map”. And more complicated ones such as “Turn to head for the Mariners' Chapel with the bell on top and find out why the drunk and disorderly usually received leniency from the courts. Re-arrange the letters in what they were usually about to do to identify a place to eliminate.”

Each group had to find the name of a location and then head to the HQ for the day and eliminate the location they had found from the master map which contained all 9 locations and one extra one and that extra one was the final answer!

What they said

“We had a great time and the girls really enjoyed finding out more about Gloucester. All sections came together to celebrate Thinking Day with Treasure Trails round the docks and Cathedral. They polished off the fun with campfire singing, cakes and renewing the promise. It was great!”  There are some media photos on Facebook.

The girls were asked to design a badge for the event and this is the one chosen - we love it!

If you or your organisation would like a bespoke Trail designed for you, get in touch and we will  connect you with the best Treasure Trails partner for the job. Could be the one of the best things to do you have come up with it!