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By Kellian Adams, Institutional Mastermind, SCVNGR
I love my job. I admit it. There are days when I’m mired in paperwork or totally overwhelmed with massive projects (a job is a job) but then I get to do awesome things like travel to Indianapolis and visit the largest Children’s Museum in the world and work with their incredible staff to build a game for their holiday visitors, and that’s pretty fantastic.
So let me back up a little bit. My name is Kellian Adams. I’m from Boston and I’m the Institutional Mastermind (ie: museums specialist) for a pretty amazing location-based gaming company called SCVNGR. I work with museums to help them create adventures out of their collections, which people can play off of their own phones either via text or our free SCVNGR app. People go places, do challenges and earn points while they learn a thing or two about art, history and culture.
I worked with The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis to create two treks for Jolly Days. Our first trek explores the hidden holiday gems in the museum. The Children’s Museum has the largest collections of any children’s museum in the U.S. so there are plenty of mystery things to find in corners and cases.
The second SCVNGR adventure asks visitors to share their holiday traditions. My Irish-New England family always bakes a fantastic pumpkin pie and traditional Indian pudding. My fiancee’s Italian-New England family gets together to make homemade Christmas ravioli and canolis while my best friend’s recently immigrated family from China celebrates with jiao-zi or Chinese dumplings. What a cool place we live in! I know, I’m waxing poetic, this is a game. But I’m proud that we were able to build a simple and fun way for families to connect around the holidays at the Children’s Museum. I’ll certainly share my favorite traditions and I can’t wait to hear what you’ll have to say.
So I returned to Boston after seeing Egypt, dinosaurs, a gigantic color explosion made of glass, a full steam engine, many Barbies and some polar bears. Not a bad trip! Not only that, Indianapolis is about 10 degrees warmer than Boston and that’s worth something. Back at SCVNGR headquarters in Boston, I’m working on my boss to see if we can get a giant dinosaur statue outside our office Second St. poking his head through the window. (There was one at The Children’s Museum and it was SO COOL! Why can’t we do that??)
So when you visit the Children’s Museum this holiday season, remember to take out your mobile device and play one of our Jolly Days adventures. Have a very happy Jolly Days and I hope that you enjoy playing our games as much as we enjoyed making them!
