Most school incursions work from a fixed template. A provider has a format, they bring it to your school, and it runs the same way it ran at the last school they visited. For most groups, that’s perfectly fine — Urban Quest’s standard incursion formats are designed to work across a wide range of primary and secondary cohorts without modification.
But some schools have specific requirements that a standard format can’t meet. A curriculum objective that needs to be explicitly addressed. A venue with unusual constraints. A group that spans an age range for which no off-the-shelf activity is designed. A Year 1 class where some students can barely read.
For those situations, Urban Quest’s school incursion team designs the experience from the ground up.
Here are seven examples of what that looks like in practice.
Urban Camp at Royal Park — A Bespoke NFP Partnership
Urban Camp is a not-for-profit organisation based in Royal Park, Melbourne. Groups of school students stay at the camp as part of structured outdoor education programs or city camps, and Urban Quest was approached to design an on-site incursion specifically around the camp’s location and the needs of those groups.
The result is a paper-based challenge course that runs through the Royal Park grounds immediately surrounding the Urban Camp building — deliberately contained so that teams never need to cross a road, teacher supervision beyond normal school policy isn’t required, and the familiar camp environment provides a safe context for students to move independently.
The format works for Years 3 through 9, accommodates groups of up to 70-80 students, and uses paper-based delivery — the right choice for an outdoor program where device management is impractical. The challenge is designed specifically around the park’s physical features and landmarks, making it genuinely site-specific rather than a generic scavenger hunt dropped into a new location.
CHES on Chapel Street — Four Levels, Minimal Outdoor Space, 100 Students
CHES — the Centre for Higher Education Studies — is a forward-thinking learning community on Chapel Street, South Yarra, designed specifically for high-ability students who want to reach further and understand more than a standard school curriculum offers. When they wanted to include an Urban Quest experience as part of their Open Day program for Year 10 students, the venue presented an unusual challenge: a four-level building with a compact, segmented floor plan, almost no outdoor space, and the busy Chapel Street streetscape immediately outside.
The students themselves added another dimension to the brief — these are high-ability Year 10 students considering CHES specifically because they want something beyond the standard curriculum. An activity that felt routine or easy would miss the point entirely. The experience needed to match their level and their appetite for genuine challenge.
Urban Quest designed and delivered this event twice, each time for 100 students, both times seamlessly.
The challenge uses all four levels of the building as distinct challenge zones, with clues and tasks embedded in the architecture of the space itself. Teams navigate vertically as well as horizontally, which creates a very different movement pattern from a typical campus incursion. The Open Day context — where students are experiencing CHES for the first time — added a layer of genuine discovery to the experience that made the challenges feel purposeful rather than imposed. For students who actively seek complexity and enjoy problem-solving, the format was a natural fit.
Firbank Grammar Brighton Campus — STEM Community Day for Everyone
This is arguably the most technically demanding custom incursion Urban Quest has designed. Firbank Grammar‘s Brighton campus wanted a STEM-focused community day activity that could genuinely include everyone — Prep through Year 6 students, their siblings, their parents, and guests of any age.
No age limit. No group size limit. No fixed start or finish time. Anyone could pick up the activity at any point during the day and complete it at their own pace.
The challenge: design a paper-based STEM game that is engaging and appropriately challenging for a Year 6 student, accessible for a Prep student, interesting for an adult, and completable at any pace from a leisurely family stroll to a focused competitive run — all simultaneously, across the same campus.
The result was a paper-based STEM challenge where every task was designed with multiple entry points — a simpler observation layer accessible to younger children and a deeper analytical layer that engaged older students and adults. Teams self-formed naturally from whoever was together at the time. The live leaderboard tracked all participants simultaneously, regardless of when they started.
The non-completion rate on the day was very low despite the maximum freedom given to participants. That outcome — high engagement with no structured enforcement — is the clearest possible proof that the design worked.
Strathcona Girls Grammar — Swimming Pool Clue and Beyond the School Gates
Strathcona Girls Grammar came to Urban Quest with specific curriculum objectives they wanted the incursion to address directly. Rather than retrofitting their objectives onto an existing format, Urban Quest designed the challenge around them — building tasks that explicitly required the skills and knowledge Strathcona’s teachers had identified as the focus.
One of the challenge locations was the school’s swimming pool. A clue was tied to a weight and placed at the bottom of the pool — students were told in advance to come prepared, and a volunteer from each team dived in to retrieve it. It’s the kind of physical, immersive challenge element that makes an incursion genuinely memorable rather than merely enjoyable — unexpected, slightly daring, and completely embedded in the physical reality of the school rather than imported from outside it.
Urban Quest also suggested extending the game area into the nearby shopping precinct adjacent to the school grounds. The teachers agreed readily, and the extension added a real-world navigation layer to the experience that the campus alone couldn’t provide. For a cohort of high-achieving students who thrive on complexity and genuine challenge, moving between the structured campus environment and the adjacent streetscape added exactly the right level of productive unfamiliarity.
Firbank Grammar Sandringham Campus — Tech-Based for Year 5 and 6 on School Tablets
Urban Quest’s standard approach for Year 5 and 6 cohorts is paper-based — the age group responds well to it, and it removes device management complexity for schools. Firbank Grammar’s Sandringham campus had a different requirement: they wanted a technology-based experience using the school’s own iPad fleet.
Urban Quest designed and delivered a tech-based Year 5-6 incursion specifically configured for school-owned iPads. The experience worked as intended — demonstrating that the platform can adapt to school device policies rather than requiring schools to adapt to the platform.
Caulfield Grammar and Aintree Primary — A Map for Students Who Can’t Yet Read
Year 1 presents a specific design challenge that most incursion providers don’t attempt to solve: some students in a Year 1 cohort are still emerging readers, and some cannot read independently at all. A challenge that relies on written clue cards is immediately inaccessible to a portion of the group — exactly the students most likely to disengage.
Caulfield Grammar, the Wheelers Hill campus, was the first school to raise this requirement with Urban Quest. The solution was a map-based format where the task sheet looked like a visual map of the school grounds, with challenge descriptions placed at their corresponding locations on the map rather than listed sequentially. Students navigate by reading the map rather than reading text, which means pre-readers can participate fully by following the visual layout, while stronger readers can engage with the task descriptions at each location.
The format was designed specifically around Caulfield Grammar’s navigation and orienteering curriculum objectives. It worked well enough that when Aintree Primary School came to Urban Quest with a similar Year 1 brief, the map format was deployed again with the same results.
For schools with early years cohorts who want a structured team challenge that genuinely includes every student regardless of reading level, this is the format.
Springvale Library — A Council-Booked Youth Program for Ages 12-19
Not every Urban Quest school incursion is booked by a school. Dandenong City Council approached Urban Quest to design a program for their youth group at Springvale Library — a mixed-age group of 12 to 19 year olds participating in school holiday activities.
The brief was different from a school booking in several ways: the age range spans both secondary school and young adult, the group is voluntary rather than captive, and the setting — around and near Springvale Library — required a custom route design that used the library precinct as the challenge environment.
Urban Quest designed a challenge that worked across the full age range, used the library building and surrounding area as the game space, and ran as a school holiday program rather than a curriculum-aligned activity. The council booking model is a reminder that Urban Quest’s customisation capability extends beyond traditional school contexts — councils, community organisations, and NFPs like Urban Camp can all commission purpose-designed experiences for their specific groups.
What Custom Design Actually Involves
These seven examples span wildly different venues, age groups, objectives, and constraints. What they share is a process: Urban Quest’s team conducts a site inspection or detailed brief, identifies the specific requirements and constraints, and designs a challenge that works within them rather than around them.
Custom incursions take more lead time than standard formats — allow at least four to six weeks for the design and preparation process. The investment is worthwhile when the standard format genuinely won’t serve the group, the objective, or the venue.
For the majority of schools, Urban Quest’s standard incursion formats deliver everything they need. For the schools where they don’t, custom design is available.
Explore Urban Quest’s standard school incursions →
Read what teachers look for in a school incursion →
Contact Urban Quest to discuss a custom school incursion →
Urban Quest has designed and delivered custom school incursions for organisations including Urban Camp (Royal Park), CHES on Chapel Street, Firbank Grammar (Brighton and Sandringham campuses), Strathcona Girls Grammar, Caulfield Grammar in Wheelers Hill, Aintree Primary School, and Springvale Library / Dandenong City Council.
