Remember those books where at the end of every page you had the choice to turn to say page 15 or page 35 depending on how you wanted the story to eventuate? Well for a long time now I’ve been thinking about how well this idea would work with QR codes in the place of page numbers. Here’s what I want to do.

  1. Go to a QR code generator website such as
  2. Select the ‘text’ option to bring up the template to create a QR code that contains text and select the barcode size as ‘Large’
  3. Write a piece of your story or copy and paste from a document.
  4. At the end of the section leave an option to “scan code 2 to …..” or scan code 3 to …..”
  5. Hit the ‘Generate’ button to create a QR code that contains the text you entered in the template.
  6. The reader then scans the CODE 1, to read the start of the story and then has the choice to scan different codes depending on how they would like the story to turn out (See the example below)




Once you have generated all of the codes you need you could then print them out and stick them onto an A4 piece of paper with the appropriate number written above. For example QR code 1 would be stuck onto a piece of paper marked with the number 1. You would then scatter the codes throughout the room or around the school and give kids a map that outlined the general location of all the codes.

They would then start scanning their codes, starting with code 1 reading the story and then ‘choosing their own adventure’ which would lead them to a new code and the next part of the story. This would continute until they had completed the entire short story and returned back to the original code.

Now I must admit an activity like this may take some time to set up, however the fact that it is very simple to create a QR code using the generator means students could easily write their own stories using this method.  In my opinion this would be well worth the effort and prove to be a highly engaging way to read and write a story. What do you think?

For information on how you can get QR code reader software onto your cell phone, you can read my previous posts here