Creative Media Practice-QR codes

I don't know what this one does...

In today's session we looked at QR codes, these are used in a lot of different ways to promote things to smart phone users such as a Facebook page advertising a company, a film trailer in replace of a headstone! We had to create something using five different QR codes. In a pair we decided to create something factual that smart phone users can gain useful information from, so we came up with the idea of using QR codes in a zoo to give fun information on the animals.

Well, this image was created in Photoshop and as you can see it is awful as I am awful at Photoshop but you get the idea. We created images of the information about each animal and then uploaded the image to Flickr and pasted the URL into http://www.qrstuff.com/ to get the QR code. These QR codes would be placed outside each enclosure around the zoo and then people will scan them for the information on each animal. Give the code a scan and have look!

My Reflection 

I don't have much of an interest in QR codes  as I never seem to scan them when I see them around. I don't see them as a useful thing as not everyone has smart phones and there is a number of more interesting and creative ways to portray media. I found this session quite boring as it did not challenge me enough due to the creation of the codes themselves being fairly simple but I did have fun making the images and coming up with silly names for the animals. I think simply scanning a code for information is what I don't find appealing as I can just use Google on my phone anyway, so if they were used to create something such as a murder mystery game or something more interactive I would find them more useful and interesting. However, I think the QR code generator website is useful tool as it allows you to create your own images, text and links so you can use the codes on almost anything and in all honestly, how do you make one of those codes yourself?