California State Fair Exhibits and Educates With QR Codes

More than sixty QR Codes were created and printed for the most recent California State Fair and if you are a local, you would know that nature and its preservation is of utmost importance to the people here. Throngs of people from all walks of life and from all over the world would head over to the yearly state fair to support its efforts. Tourists and foreigners are known to support its cause too.

And this year, things are just a little bit more different as organizers of the fair had gone ahead to improve visitors’ experience by letting them learn more about the flora and fauna exhibited during the state fair with a QR Code. Although you would need a third party QR Code reader to scan the code, it would seem that a majority of the people who visited the fair had no problems identifying with the codes and also exhibited knowledge, curiosity and willingness to scan the code a the event.

Scanning the code leads smartphone owners to links, media files and videos that have been uploaded into the internet; needless to say, you would have to have your own data plan to use the codes or at the very least, available Wifi provided by the organizers.

Heather Lopez of Cal Expo said that there are QR Codes hanging all around the place, even on palm trees at the entrance with messages like ‘click to see what is around you’ and there were also QR Codes leading to maps that showed visitors a map of the venue and identifying their location to help them navigate through the venue more easily.

At the California State Fair, the exhibits include plants like alfalfa, sugar cane, vanilla, Sudan grass and even Japanese cucumber. Need to know more about Japanese cucumber? No problem. Scan the code.

Visitors happily reported that they saw a lot of people scanning the codes without instructions. Last year, while there were a lot of skeptics citing their disbelief and cynicism about the effectiveness of the codes, this year, they have become a little bit more of a fence-sitter – observing and wondering if it was possible that QR Codes is the next big thing in advertising and education.

One of the organizers said that while it was wonderful that creating a QR Code and printing them was easy and free, what was time consuming was finding relevant and accurate websites to link to. And what is amazing is the fact that you can actually bookmark the links that you scan up on the smartphone by saving the QR Code. This way, learning can be done AFTER the event to reduce wastage of time.

Walk past the vanilla and interested but no time? Scan, save and read later. I simply can’t find a fault with that.