There’s a particular kind of student observation that cuts through all the marketing language about school excursions and gets directly to what actually happened.
This is one of them.
A Year 12 student from Cranbourne East Secondary College, reflecting on their Urban Quest Melbourne CBD excursion immediately after finishing — not as a prepared statement, but in their own words, unscripted, still catching their breath:
“I didn’t expect — like no offence to my peers — just sometimes they just don’t fully engage. But I think you guys did really well to make this both exciting with all the clues and making us feel smart, like solving riddles and all that, and helping us get engaged. I saw basically almost everyone who would come and start — at some point along the journey — and it’s just really fun to have that competitiveness.”
That observation — from a student, not a teacher, not a facilitator — is the clearest possible articulation of what Urban Quest is designed to do for secondary school cohorts. The students who don’t normally engage – did.
What This Year 12 Student Experienced
Watch the full interview filmed immediately after the excursion:
The student’s account covers the experience from start to finish — and what comes through is the specific combination of elements that made it work.
Real Melbourne Landmarks as Part of the Challenge
“I loved how it was so interactive with both real life landmarks — like the streets. There was one where we had to find an intersection between Lonsdale and Exhibition Street, which I loved. I thought it was really creative.”
For Year 12 students who have grown up in Melbourne’s outer suburbs, the CBD’s street grid is something they know exists but haven’t necessarily navigated on their own terms. Being given a challenge that requires finding a specific intersection — not as a geography exercise, but as a competitive clue under time pressure — changes the relationship between the student and the city. They’re not tourists. They’re problem-solvers using the city as their environment.
Challenges That Felt Genuinely Surprising
“There was this one where you had us call a number, which I didn’t even know we could do — which was just awesome.”
The best team building challenges are the ones that produce genuine surprise — where the solution isn’t obvious until it clicks, and when it does, the team feels collectively smart for figuring it out. That moment of shared discovery is what creates the social bond that the experience is designed to produce. A challenge that surprises a Year 12 student who thought they’d seen everything is doing their job.
Competition That Pulled Everyone In
“I felt like I was beating my friends — my friends pulling ahead would make me want to try harder to get to win first.”
The competitive format is deliberate. Urban Quest doesn’t just put students in groups and ask them to collaborate — it creates genuine stakes through the leaderboard, where every correct answer and every minute saved translates directly into position. That external competitive pressure is what activates the students who would otherwise disengage, because the motivation is no longer “we should work together” but “I want to win.”
The Student Who Didn’t Win — and Didn’t Care
This is the observation that stands out most from a school excursion design perspective:
“It sucks we didn’t get first place, but I think personally I found the whole thing well worth it even without winning. I think it should just be fun even without the reward at the end.”
A student who can articulate that the experience had intrinsic value — separate from the competitive outcome — is describing exactly what a well-designed team building experience should produce. The competition drives engagement. But what remains after the competition ends is something else: the shared effort, the moments of collective problem-solving, the memory of running through Melbourne’s streets with their team. That’s what carries back into the classroom.
Why Engagement Matters for Year 12 Specifically
Year 12 is the hardest year level to plan excursions for. Students are time-conscious, academically pressured, and socially stratified in ways that have solidified over six years of secondary school. An activity that doesn’t genuinely engage them produces eye-rolling at worst and polite indifference at best.
What this student described — peers who don’t normally engage, engaging — is the outcome that makes an Urban Quest excursion genuinely valuable for a Year 12 cohort. Not because it produces exam results, but because it changes the social texture of the group for the remainder of the year.
Year 12 students who have shared a genuine challenge together — who have seen each other be unexpectedly capable, unexpectedly competitive, unexpectedly invested — carry that knowledge into the final months of school. That’s a different kind of preparation for what comes next than any classroom activity can produce.
Explore Urban Quest’s school excursions →
Read what other secondary students experienced →
Contact Urban Quest for a school excursion proposal →
Cranbourne East Secondary College’s Year 12 cohort is one of hundreds of Victorian secondary schools that have run Urban Quest CBD excursions. Other Year 12 schools include Waverley Christian College, Nazareth College, and Koo Wee Rup Secondary College.
