Geocaching--a hobby or classroom activity

I recently watched the video "Unlikely Coordinates" by Beth Ritter-Guth from Lakeville, CT. The video itself was a little dry with Beth choosing to show websites and videos and a glogster with a voice over. The content, though, intrigued me. She took her private school students along with two math teachers to a Sharon, CT, graveyard. The students were armed with handheld GPS systems and her IPHONE. They had to choose three gravestones and create clues about them along with the coordinates. They later returned to the classroom and created a story with clues for a separate class to find on Halloween.

"Geocaching" is the term. She compares it to letter boxing during the Victorian era. It seems like a fun family activity or hobby. In my town, we take our kids annually on a scavenger hunt in the woods through trails to discover clues and small treasure. It is a fun day! In the classroom, students can either go and search for treasure...there are approximately 9,000 geocaches around the globe or students could create new geocaches for other students or other people to locate.

Ms. Ritter-Guth included her wikispace and glogster to show how she has accomplished this task with students. She recommends the site that I linked as, in her opinion, the best site. It is free to register, which is nice and she did not feel that students would need to pay for the other options. She also mentioned some of the smiley faces and other icons that assist people and particularly students in locating easy geocaches. She used a new word--muggled--which I thought was an interesting word. It refers to a geocach that cannot be located, perhaps because it has been washed away or taken away.

In the end, she recommended this as a fun student or family activity. She also recommended finding multi step geocaches. I like this idea and think that it could be a great scavenger hunt activity for students. Like so many other things that we discover here, though, it requires technology that we simply do not have access to. We do not have hand held GPS systems and I can't imagine giving my students my own IPHONE to use for an activity. In addition, the teacher as a technology teacher was working with an Algebra teacher. Thus, there were two teachers working with a small class of perhaps 12 students.

In the end, I really liked the concept. The students enjoyed the field trip away from the classroom. They then spent a week creating the stories and clues. Many of the students according to Ritter-Guth found the most challenging aspect of the entire project to be the time in the classroom. Students had to think backwards from their solutions in the graveyard to create stories and clues for the other algebra class. Students were not used to thinking in this manner. In and of itself, I think it is valuable to have students go through an exercise in backwards design.

I may try geocaching this spring with my family. Even though I did not love her presentation, I really did like the concept of it. Still, I think it will be a long time before I have access to the technology to create activities for my students using this technology in my classroom.