A modern day Treasure Hunt
On the last day of the Easter Holidays – I was stuck as to what to do for the day with my two children ( aged 4 and 8) – we regularly go up town and visit the local museums etc and the week before we had been tourists in our own area so was looking for inspiration.
So as normal I turned to Twitter – within 10 minutes I had suggestions of places that I had never visited and links to check out as well! One in particular caught my eye – geocaching! Now I had heard about Geocaching but in reality was a muggle when it came to doing it or knowing about it in depth.
Geocaching according to Wikipedia is:
an outdoor activity in which the participants use a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver or other navigational techniques to hide and seek containers (called “geocaches” or “caches”) anywhere in the world.
So I logged onto www.geocaching.com to find out more – I put in our home address to see if there were caches near by- and there were in fact they are everywhere. The good news was that there were two in are local park – so as the adverts tells us – there’s an app for that – I downloaded one for my iPhone and saved the two caches.
We then set off, the children took it in turns to hold the phone and tell me how near we were getting – the good news was we found 1 cache, the other we just could not see. However, the sense of achievement and joy when we found one was great. We all really enjoyed it – it gave a purpose to our normal walk, enabled us to work together and introduce Geography to my children. It is also something that we can do when out and about – two days later when in our local high street – my 4 year old was playing on my iPhone and asked – ‘mummy, how do I find out if there’s treasure near here?’
I can also see how this can be quite addictive as I started to type in addresses of places we regularly visit to see if there were caches nearby – there are! The possibilities of using in school are wide – ranging too – and I will be incorporating this when we visit the park with the Year group.
This modern day treasure hunt has a new convert. Thanks to @Joe_Librarian for the tweet that set us off.
Hi from @Joe_Librarian
It is indeed quite persuasive; every time I go somewhere – in the world – I find where there are geocaches and go and have a hunt. It’s useful for fun, in a group, or if you suddenly have time to fill on your hands (thinks) a lot of people stuck in the wrong country this last five days may have found it useful!
And with over a million geocaches and climbing worldwide, there’s a few pretty much anywhere.
Looking at the curriculum, there’s a bundle of subject areas which geocaching touches on. Geography, local environment and history; maths and numeracy, English (interpretation of clues), basic physics, technology. Lots of spatial awareness stuff going on, plus teamwork (essential for multiple-stage puzzles or relatively difficult ones). Oh, and getting a bit of exercise at the same time – “Stealth health”?
Just a thought, but as a further activity, setting up a cache has a lot of fun *and* educational potential. Choosing the location; writing the description (and pitching it just right); submitting it; monitoring who finds it, and keeping a track that it stays in the right place. And being part of a massive community of geocache enthusiasts doing the same.
Cheers Joe – some great ideas and thanks for setting me off on the path to start with
Really interesting post as usual Dawn, thanks ! I was playing with a free iphone app over the holiday called GPSed (http://gpsed.com/) which tracks the walks you go on and marks them on google maps. Any photos you take or comments you make are added to the map as you go along, allowing you to review your journey and the points of interest online. Great fun and great potential for creating trails for others to follow or merely an interesting way to keep a record of your walk.