While walking through the halls of EHS last week, you may have been surprised to see constellations taped to the white walls.

These star clusters were part of a scavenger hunt created for astronomy students by seniors Claudia Vasquez and Karli Hubbard. The girls printed out several constellations and placed them at locations in the school that correlated to the position they would be in on the celestial sphere at 12 p.m. on Halloween. Students were given a map of the constellations and were responsible for searching for the stars on their own time.

“Their objective was to find the given constellations that were located on the first floor as if it was the night sky (and take a picture with them),” Vazquez said.

The girls began working on the scavenger hunt in early September after the idea came to them in their astronomy class one day.

“(Our student teacher) was walking around the classroom while everyone was doing the packets and was asking everyone how we felt about participating in a debate for a project,” Hubbard said. “Claudia and I thought, jokingly, that a scavenger hunt would be more fun than a debate, but then we said ‘why not do it,’ so we started planning it out.”

Vazquez and Hubbard wanted to create the scavenger hunt to make the class more interesting for their peers.

“At the beginning of the year, everyone is getting used to the idea of going back to school every day, so I thought it’d be nice to do something a little refreshing and different from our other classes,” Vazquez said.

The girls’ hard work resulted in extra credit for them as well as praise from their peers for giving them the opportunity to receive extra credit for finding the most constellations. Rachel Wallace, astronomy teacher Dave Boedeker’s student teacher, was very happy with the way the scavenger hunt turned out and even told the girls that she might have to do it with her future classes.

“I thought it was a great idea,” Ms. Wallace said. “It was really fun. They got so pumped about it and just really went with it which was honestly very inspiring.”