I’m sure you’re well aware that the holidays are over. Given that you will now be back at school and doing all the school things that happen while you are attending school.

But over the holidays some of you did cool things (not school things!) that we asked you to do as part of our Wellington City SPYbraries online challenge. Some of you received spot prizes for the cool things you did! Some of you completed the whole challenge and have been awarded other prizes! And some of you submitted things that are cool enough that we want to share them right here on our very cool teen blog.

So let’s look at a couple of these cool things!

Hide the Evidence

To complete this activity, we asked you to choose a dastardly piece of evidence, an object with a history so hectic and harrowing that the best thing to do with it is to hide it away so that no one in authority will manage to lay eye on it ever again. We asked you to hide your chosen object somewhere, then submit a photo of the thing you’re hiding and a photo of the scene where it’s hidden so that other investigators-in-training can practice their seek-and-find skills and, I spy or Where’s Wally? style, seek out the hidden object.

Exhibit A: The evidence

My favourite submission is this one by an anonymous participant. Exhibit A is the evidence being hidden. What crimes did this small LEGO® cat commit? Exhibit B is the area where the cat is hiding. I found it! It was a challenge though. Can you find the cat?

If you’re having trouble spotting the cat, you may need to click on Exhibit B to make it larger.

Exhibit B: The crime scene. Can you spot the evidence?

The Cold Case

To complete this activity we asked you to find an old photograph, something from your childhood, something from your parent’s childhood, maybe even something we have available over on Wellington City Recollect, and recreate it. Sometimes by looking at old evidence in a new way, the new perspective can reveal unseen clues or insights. Or so we said.

I was less-than-secretly hoping that someone would be inspired to recreate this particular image on Recollect.

Taken in our ‘Junior Library‘ in 1946. What a time.

But alas, no one did.

Anyway!

We were assuming that people would take a new photograph with the scene staged in the same way as the old. We didn’t actually guess that someone would illustrate the photo they were recreating. But someone did! Which I think is a wonderfully creative way of completing the case assignment.

To conclude, we hope you all enjoyed the holidays, we hope those of you who took part enjoyed Wellington City SPYbraries, and we hope that term 2 has started well for you all!