Here are the answers to the ClockTHREEjr give-away challenge.
On the challenge sheet, puzzlers were challenged to find and solve five puzzles around the Maker Faire NC venue. The “hint” was that there were a few logos on the clue sheet that indicated which booths are presenting challenges. In no particular order the five booths were:
- Shopbot
- opensource.com
- Harris Educational
- Bull City Craft
- wyolum.com
On the back of the challenge sheet, were 100 2-digit numbers, each associated with a code word or phase. These were the 100 possible answers of the five booth puzzles.
Shopbot was giving away QR code pendends. If you took a picture of the QR code with your smart phone, you ended up a a webpage that listed the uses for “CNC”. One of the uses was “the answer to the ClockTHREEjr challenge”. The answer was was of course “CNC”.
Opensource.com had another tough challenge. One of thier designers was there in the morning and drew documents with red hair (like Little Orphan Annie) on thierr whiteboard. For anyone who needed more help, Ruth explained what orphan works are (http://opensource.com/business/10/12/cookbooks-orphans-and-out-print-books). Nevertheless, one guy decided the answer was “butter cream.” 😀
Harris Educational had another pictogram puzzler: They had a picture up of: a baseball cap, the letter “A”, and sitting dog. The answer was cap+A+sitter or capacitor.
The clue for Bull City Craft was just a list of numbers. If you looked around their booth they had a numbered color chart. If you took the first letter from each of the colors indicated by numbers, you came up with “kangaroo”
The WyoLum puzzle was similar. We had a string of numbers and letters: “A13B3C10D13E2”. We were passing out business cards with the ClockTHREEjr faceplate printed on the back with the time “Its four o’clock” displayed which was also the time that the final clue was to be given out. If you noticed the letters increasing from “A” to “E” in the string, it might have occured to you that the letters were indicating a row of the ClockTHREE faceplate. The numbers by default would be the column. The answer was “laugh”. My 11 year old daughter Elizabeth came up with that great challenge.
If you solved all five puzzles you ended up with five answers and five two digit numbers. A couple of clever teams realized that the initial letter of each answer was an anagram for “Clock” and were convinced that that was the answer to the whole puzzle. We assured them that they would know when they won and that they should “keep going”.
At 4:00 we revealed the final clue.
_ _ _ _ _THREEjr.
Almost everyone filled in the blank with “Clock” but were flummoxed when we encouraged them to keep going. Our winners realized very quickly the numbers still have not been used and that they were not a red herring. “Clock” indicated the order to put the 10 digits in which gave a phone number. When they called the number, they won!!!
Thanks to everyone who participated! We had a great time putting it together!