My 6 year old daughter is absolutely fascinated by QR codes. I've been nagged into scanning ones on posters, in magazines, and even one that showed up in the middle of a TV show...
I have a six year old son with this same fascination. Sometimes I'll walk into my home office and find some mailer with a QR code sitting there waiting for me. His inquisitive mind just has to know what the phone will do with the code.
I've got some somewhere, but I don't think they did QR codes and they certainly didn't launch a link - that's what she enjoys. No idea why, but I'm not going to discourage her from anything that gets her interested in technology. We're going to get a t-shirt printed for her with a QR code saying "If found, please ring [phone number]".
I do mountain bike (and thus indirectly hiking) trail development, construction, and maintenance as volunteer work. This has shown me a surprisingly useful place for QR codes: on trailhead map boards. The code just links to a (well optimized) PDF of the map itself, along with some text that says "Scan this with your phone to download a copy of the map.".
It amazes me how many people I see scanning the QR code to get a copy of the map before they head out on the trails.
I actually found them quite useful as a bookmarking tool when comparison shopping appliances at retail stores. They usually had code to the retailer's page for the appliance, and another for the manufacturer's page.