University Induction "Collect the Set" - using mobile location check-in

I've been inspired this week but a two posts about Foursquare:

Brent Schlenker talking about whether there is learning potential in rewarding location based check-ins, and Andrew Careaga about including check-ins as part of their campus social media strategy.

Background: Foursquare is a location based social network where users check-in at a location to earn badges, get tips or find out who else they know is (or has been) there recently. There are other competing location based networks like Gowalla, Google Latitude and Britekite. See wikipedia for more.

The idea brewing in my head is to make use of the increasing popularity of these kind of services on mobile devices for first year induction - a way of encouraging new students to explore their university sites and services.

Foursquare offers badges for completing certain (secret) targets, but I don't believe users are able to set their own badges. What I'd like to do is reward students who manage to check-in at all buildings in a particular set (say all buildings on their campus). In the case of the University of Brighton we have 5 campuses, and six libraries scattered from Falmer to Hastings. It's unlikely that any student would ever visit all 5, but they could find new friends on Community@Brighton (our social networking site - Elgg) and complete a set between them.

I need to investigate the privacy issues of check-in statuses, but I believe unless you are somewhere at the same time as another user you can't see their history easily. You can claim locations as the manager, which may be what we need to do in order to track who has checked in.

I think the idea of making friends to complete a set with some kind of (nominal) reward might just strike the right note in those scary early weeks. Would welcome comments, and any University of Brighton colleagues reading this, who's up for helping me try this out!