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***image1***Students in Elaine Edwards seventh-grade class were offered a rare experience Oct. 20. They went on a “geocaching” adventure.
Geocaching, according to guest presenter Capt. Brian Taylor, is an entertaining adventure game for GPS users. The basic idea is to have individuals and organizations set up caches all over the world and share the locations of these caches on the Internet. GPS users can then use the location coordinates to find the caches. Once found, a cache may provide the visitor with a wide variety of rewards. Visitors are asked to leave something behind for the cache if they find something.
Captain Taylor and his wife, Ashley, came to LEMS during seminar to teach the seventh-grade students about geocaching using a GPS. Captain Taylor and his wife have found more than 1,640 caches and hidden 30 of their own. Prior to the beginning of class, Captain Taylor and his crew hid a few caches in the LEMS school yard, so that groups of students could use a GPS to find them during seminar.
“This was our first time teaching geo-caching to middle school students. It is a great activity because it involves exercise and learning new technology,” said Captain Taylor. “Geocaching can be adapted to any type of activity: biking, hiking, driving and even shopping. It is also supposed to teach care of the environment. These students are more savvy with the technology than we expected. They picked it up quickly. It was fun watching the students so excited about running around trying to find the caches.”
The students used the school grounds as their search area and learned a tremendous amount during the activity. According to Ms. Edwards, the Armed Forces Communication and Electronics Association provided money to the school to purchase two GPS units, and Captain Taylor brought three more for the students to use.
Also according to Ms. Edwards, the class is currently studying motion. With the GPS, students could see the distance they traveled, the time traveled and calculate their speed to compare with the GPS speed. They also had to find and answer questions related to the topic when they found a clue that led them to the next cache.
“It was frustrating looking for something for ten minutes and then rewarding when you finally found it,” said Brendan Johansen.
“I didn’t want to stop until our group found all of the caches,” added Nathanial Lashley.
Leanna Eck and Mitchell Basham had similar thoughts.
“This was really neat. I liked having to hunt for things. It was cool being able to run around the school looking for stuff with a GPS device with my friends.”
