Aurora Christian seniors take part in digital scavenger hunt

It was odd to see groups of casually-dressed teenagers in downtown St. Charles last week on a drizzly weekday morning.

It was even crazier to catch up with them to find out exactly what they were doing.

Zac Kopple, 17, of Minooka pretended to propose to Eric Andersen, 17, of Elburn with an authentic diamond ring.

"We went into a jewelry store and asked the guy if we could use a ring and he pulled one out of a vault and said it was worth $50,000," Kopple said.

Kopple and Andersen and the others who were in their small group are seniors at Aurora Christian High School, and the assignment - to propose in a jewelry store and record the moment with a digital camera - was one of 60 such assignments.

Nearly 90 students, all seniors at the school, converged on downtown St. Charles for a digital scavenger hunt. They were assisted (or at least tolerated) by sympathetic merchants, retail employees and police officers.

"We also sang 'The Ants Go Marching One by One' to people in a grocery store," Andersen said of one of their assignments.

Other tasks, also for digital snapshots, included getting the whole group into a port-a-potty, eating a 5-scoop ice cream cone, petting a dog with a mailman and sitting in the back of a squad car.

The group met at 9 a.m. in Mount Saint Mary Park to get their assignments and form small groups. With at least one digital camera or cell phone in each group, the students crisscrossed downtown St. Charles on their mission, grasping their soggy assignment sheets.

The rain lessened to a drizzle and then stopped before they returned to the park four hours later to eat lunch and download their photos.

Twins Amber and Ashley Malmgren, 17, of Aurora, new to the school this year, were the only girls in a group with eight football players.

"They're our guys," Amber said. "We're making football shirts for them."

And how about the new school?

"We love it," Amber said. "God is the reason we're here."

"God gave us a challenge, to get to know each other," said their companion, Marcus Schmidt, 17, of Glendale Heights. He is also new to the school.

The scavenger hunt was meant to help the students bond at the start of the new school year.

"It's a good exercise because we're in a different atmosphere where we can talk," said Lewis Gaddis, 17, of Aurora, also a football player. "We're coming together, working on one objective."