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Location: Telegraph Avenue
We didn't do very well on this puzzle. In hindsight, I could have helped the team out a lot if I'd communicated better; as it was, I kinda screwed up.
At the UC Berkeley student union at the base of Telegraph Avenue, there was a plastic box full of puzzles. We extracted one of these puzzles: an envelope full of photos. This envelope was decorated with a large map of Telegraph Avenue. The photos--were of architectural details of buildings along Telegraph Avenue.
I was familiar with this stretch of Telegraph Avenue--I visted the U.C. Berkeley library about once a month and often ate lunch at some Telegraph Avenue cafe. In general, this was not a very practical way to spend my time. But in this context, it meant I had relevant knowledge: I recognized the locations of about 2/3 of these photos. Someone else (Greg?) also spent a lot of time in Berkeley and recognized most photos. To us, it was clear that these photos could be grouped by subject: there were several of Rasputin's Records, several of the Body Shop building, etc. Unfortunately, we didn't communicate this well to other people on the team. As some people were sorting the photos by building, other people re-sorted those photos based on some other criteria. We spent way too much time shuffling photos in this way.
Eventually, we got our act together. Each person held a clump of photos. We walked down Telegraph Avenue. As we reached each spot, we'd dig out the photos of that spot.
Photos were in two widths. And clumps of photos were of the same subject. As if someone were standing in one spot, slowly panning across, taking photos of two widths. Oh, making Morse code letters. If you laid out all photos of some spot, the narrow and wide photos formed the dots and dashes of Morse code.
So we had a bunch of letters. And based on the location of the photo subject on Telegraph Avenue we had... a strange jumble of letters. Oh, wait--based on the place where the photographer was standing when he took each clump of photos, we had a sequence of letters.
Soon we were on our way to the Chabot Science Center up in the Oakland Hills.