How to Write a Treasure Hunt for ESL Students

Introduction

The Tresure Hunts for ESL Students project is a group of treasure hunts produced by ESL/EFL teachers around the world. Anyone who is interested in trying to write a few to add to our collection should feel free to participate. All acceptable submissions (meaning probably all submissions) will be put online and may be accessed by students all over the world at: http://www.aitech.ac.jp/~iteslj/th/.

Guidelines for Writing "Treasure Hunts"

Use major sites which aren't likely to go offline. This will prevent "Not Found" error messages from your page.
Do treasure hunts by theme. (ie. Music, sports, food,...)
Limit the treasure hunts to something that will not take too long. Perhaps 10 to 20 minutes is a good amount of time.
Perhaps it is a good idea to ask only two or three questions about each site. Too many questions about any one site and it may seem more like a reading comprehension test than a treasure hunt. If you would like to develop a detailed lesson related to one site, then please write one for our ESL Student Guides to the Internet project.
Use the comment code to hide the answers in the HTML.
<! This is a sample hidden answer. >

How to Write a Treasure Hunt Page

Visit one of the existing "treasure hunts".
Save that page as "source", to get the HTML version onto your disk.
Read the "source" with a text editor or a word processor.
Delete the unecessary stuff, keep the basic layout, then add your own stuff.
E-mail it to iteslj@ge.aitech.ac.jp.
We will then put it online and link to it from the main page of the treasure hunts.

HTML Basics

You don't need to understand much about HTML in order to write a quiz. However, you should know the following.

Anything between < and > is HTML code and does not show on the page.
Any number of consecutive spaces, returns or tabs are reduced to one space on the web page.
You can view the source code of any web page, using the "View Source" or "Save as Source" menu items in Netscape or Internet Explorer. This means that you do not need to type any of the HTML code in the quizzes since you can just download one of our existing quizzes and change the parts that need to be changed.
Different browsers and different computers display web pages differently which means the way the page looks on your computer is not necessairly the way it will look on other computers.
For more information on HTML, read the HTML Quick Start Guide at http://www.aitech.ac.jp/~iteslj/Articles/web-page/. This is a short and concise explanation of only things you absolutely need to know.