Leah Kirwan

GPS Geocaching

Hide and Seek GPS and Geocaching in the Classroom (Lynn M. Lary)

Hide and Seek is an article about using GPS to geocach.  ?Geocaching is a high-tech, worldwide treasure hunt,? states Lary.  The geocach is a huge database where you can put in coordinates/units and find different caches in a particular area.  Someone has to create the hunt by putting in clues and starting the hunt.  The units are the longitude and latitude of a location.  You can also create a multi-site cache where you have to plug in the units and then have to do a calculation to determine the next set of units.  The GPS unit can be used for a variety of things not just getting from point A to point B, but for educational purposes.    

The first thing before even using the GPS unit is the figure out how it works.  The GPS device is a way to find where items are in relation to where you are and it tells you how to get there.  A good warm-up idea is to give your group longitude and latitude coordinates where the group can enter them in the GPS unit and find the locations.  A great activity the article goes over is when they went to Thurston Middle School and they created 12 geocaches for the students to find.  The students had to break up into groups of three and work as a group to figure out the clues to get the coordinates for the geocach.  One of the clues looked like this:

Look for Box # _________ = 100 ? 80 / 2 ? 2 x 25 + 1 (fill in the ___ with the answer to this problem, 11

This idea of turning learning into a hunt gets students engaged and wanting to learn more about different locations around the world. 

Currently I teach Computer Applications One at Garner Magnet.  In our new curriculum we have to go over databases and different types of handheld devices.  The GPS and geocaching idea would be a great resource in my classroom.  With the GPS database students will better understand what Access (database) is and why it is important for them to learn how to use because they use databases every day if they have GPS in their cars, phones, and at their house.  Knowing how to cache would be a great classroom activity getting students to find where different computer factories are, where Bill Gates lives, and where certain handheld devices originated so they can get a background the technology.  Being in a Magnet school they stress on inter-department collaboration and team teaching to provide a better learning experience for the students.  Some ideas of collaboration would be to team up with an English teacher and to geocach the different locations of their reading assignments (Pig Farm, Death of a Sales Man, and The Odyssey) and then the students would find the geocaches in my classroom because I am equipped with the GPS units.  Just like in the article another idea would be to team up with a History teacher and geocach different locations about a country or city that they are talking about in the classroom.  The GPS provides different resources for teaching material and would be a great asset to any school system if they purchased them.  The idea is to engage and teach and that is exactly what the GPS geocach does. 

Posted at 09:02AM Jun 03, 2006 by KIRWAN, LEAH in General  |  Comments[0]