Geocaching and Education, part 2 - Vocabulary Lesson

This is post #2 in a series of free resources for educators interested in using geocaching in education and other community groups like scouts or camps. The material is pulled directly from Educaching GPS Based Curriculum for Teachers. If interested in more resources, check out www.educaching.com.
Sincerely,
Jason Hubbard, Author

Know The Lingo!

In order to embark upon this adventure, you will need to familiarize yourself with the terminology of an educacher. Here’s your language lesson:

cache – This is the first word you need to know! It is pronounced just like the word “cash.” The original word refers to some sort of a hiding place that items were temporarily stored in. Your computer has a memory cache where files are stored in order to gain quick access. In this book, we will refer to any item that is hidden as an Educache (defined below).

coordinates – These are the latitude and longitude measurements which, combined, make up a waypoint. They can be displayed a variety of ways (refer to your GPS receiver manual), but the default setting for most GPS receivers is to show you coordinates in decimal minutes, which is used for the examples in the lessons of this book. The format looks like this example: N41°33.383   W83°36.280

The N and W are your headings (North and West), the first two numbers in each set show you the degrees, and the 5 digit decimal number following is the minutes converted to decimal form. Note: The full coordinate format is degrees, minutes, and seconds

Educache – Any item or container that is hidden for students to find and directly applies to their learning.

Educaching – This is a teacher-led, student-driven hunt for learning involving GPS technology, mapping, teamwork, and adventure! The students work in teams and use latitude and longitude coordinates to find hidden puzzles, science experiments, math problems, and many other educational lessons.

geocaching – Geocaching is the original adventure sport for GPS users that originated in 2000. The sport involves people from all over the world with caches hidden all over the world. Many caches hide bits of history, puzzles, track-able items that travel the world, tiny trinkets to take and to leave, or just a log to sign that proves you found one!

GPS – This is short for the global positioning system, which is a system of 27 satellites (24 active, 3 for backup) that circulate the globe sending signals that are picked up by GPS receivers.

GPS receiver (GPSr) – A unit that can fit in the palm of your hand or on the dashboard of your vehicle that will receive signals from several of the GPS satellites and allow you to pinpoint your location (or the location of something else) anywhere on Earth. Most smartphones come equipped with an onboard, reliable GPS chipset that can be used with extremely affordable apps to find caches.

field sheet – The field sheet is what students take with them out into the schoolyard in order to record measurements, log findings, solve puzzles, and record other data relevant to the lesson. It serves as their written record and is used when they return to the classroom for debriefing of the lesson and further study.  

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student/teacher map – These maps are fundamental in implementing each lesson. An Educache can certainly be found without using a map, but will be used in these lessons to hold students accountable to the locations they find and will increase mapping skills, directional awareness, and will allow the students to create a model of distances and measurements. The teacher will use the teacher map in preparation of the activities in order to have a physical model on paper of where each Educache is located. The students will each have a copy of the student map so they can draw and log the locations and waypoints and, in many cases, create a physical representation of the data they’ve found for later study.

trackpoints – a single dot that appears on the GPS display recording user movement. 

travel bug/geocoin – These are the names of just a few of the items that can be purchased online and sent to travel wherever you want them to go. Their progress can be tracked online, with stories and pictures logged by the finders of these items as they make their journey to other states and countries. See the Beyond The Basics section for applicable uses of these items with your classroom.

waypoint – A waypoint is a marked location that is stored in the memory of your GPS receiver. When you hide an educache for your students, you will mark the waypoint in your GPS receiver and on your teacher map for reference. You will give these waypoints to your students in order to find an educache at that given location.

Geocaching and Education, part 1

This is the first post in a series of free resources for educators interested in using geocaching in education and other community groups like scouts or camps. The material is pulled directly from Educaching GPS Based Curriculum for Teachers. If interested in more resources, check out www.educaching.com.

Sincerely,

Jason Hubbard, Author

What is Educaching?

Educaching could be described as a mixture of Hide and Seek, treasure hunting, and learning all wrapped up into one experience. When you were younger and you used to play Hide and Seek, there was a thrill involved with finding other children who were hidden in secret spots and the victory won when you “spotted” them. And who of us has never had thoughts of finding “buried treasure” or finding the “X” that marks the spot? There is also a fascination, especially among children, with gadgets, gizmos, and technological wonders of our day and age, in which young people are the chief users. In many cases they can run circles around their parents and teachers in regard to the use of technologies available to us today. 

So, why not place this technology into their hands, give them a few clues to go find hidden “treasure” with it, and use these methods as a vehicle to teach your lessons and curriculum? Interested? This is what I call Educaching!

The students actually seek knowledge. They are responsible for probing and discovering what they must know. It is an incredible responsibility that is incredibly fun! Here’s a quick rundown of how it all works. You take some math problems, or a piece of historical knowledge, or a science experiment, and you hide these things somewhere on the school grounds outdoors (GPS does not work indoors…yet). Then, you use a GPS receiver to obtain signals from the satellites to give you the exact locations of the objects you have hidden. You save these locations as “waypoints,” which can be stored in your receiver’s memory. Next, you give the students the waypoints, along with a map and a GPS receiver and have them go out into the school yard and find what is hidden. When they find these objects, a.k.a. an Educache, they have a job to do. For example, they must collect data, take measurements, solve a problem, perform an experiment, or take a picture.  When the hunt is over, the students return with you indoors to discuss their discoveries, complete assessments, and extend their learning further through projects and presentations. Sound difficult? It isn’t, once you familiarize yourself with the GPS receiver and follow the instructions within this manual. You’ll be preparing your first Educaching hunt for your students in no time!

Common Core Math...What do you think?

You'd probably be living in a cave if you're in math education and have not perused the Common Core. These standards open new pathways within our grade levels and bring new challenges. As we see the future path of our teaching unfold with these standards, is there room for educaching? I say there's always room for it! Let's start the discussion here. How do you see these ideas take shape in a GPS adventure with your class?

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Crime Scene Investigator...Educaching style!

The great folks at www.sciencespot.net put together a Learning with GPS section. Among many great tried and true lesson plans, there is one on investigation called CSI Adventure. Using the premise of geocaching already ties in the unique nature of hunting for learning, so this lesson creates a perfect marriage of students becoming real detectives as they actually search for clues. The lesson and clue cards are presented below or you can visit the link above to find the documents separately, along with a helpful power point file.

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What makes a great hiding spot?

Can you say...Easter Egg Hunt? Growing up, I remember running around my church's yard in my Easter suit searching high and low with the other church kids finding those great candy-filled plastic eggs. What a great time! Were the eggs difficult to find? Not too bad, considering they were brightly-colored and within my childish reach.

An Easter egg hunt is what we should consider when looking for great hiding spots in the school yard. Remember that eye-level and below is key. Anything higher than your students' eye-level might be out of your shortest student's reach. Plant life can make great hiding spots. For example, mulch beds, shrubs, right around the roots of trees but covered a little by grass clippings or pieces of bark can hide smaller caches. Many trees have notches, holes, large roots among which caches can become more camouflaged. If you find a good spot up in a tree, use it, but be sure it's not so high that a child might be tempted to "go ape."
If you have a school yard which is bereft of natural plant life, perhaps there are metallic structures that may be used. Cache containers equipped with magnetic strips on them can be attached to fencing, poles, signs, and other metal school structures and still remain hidden.

Finally, care should be taken to carefully camouflage your containers. A roll of camo duct tape can be purchased from WalMart or other similar store for around $2-3. This can be wrapped around film canisters and other plastic containers. For a little more moola (around $5 per can), brown or green spray paint can be purchased to coat all your containers. Camouflage colors are available at similar stores. For years, I have used 2 cans (1 brown, 1 OD green) and used both to give my containers a nice camo look. Some geocachers have used hide-a-key rocks for tricky cache containers, among many other great ideas. I heard from a teacher years ago who glues grass clippings to the top of Altoid cases and those old floppy disk cases and hides these containers in the middle of an open field! The possibilities are only limited by your imagination and your students will appreciate your creative hides. Feel free to leave a comment with your great ideas to add!

Rainy Day Blues? Part 2...Mathcaching

If you missed the first part of this post, you can find it here. Sometimes, you have this tremendously awesome lesson planned to take your students outside educaching and you've prepared several hours, when all of a sudden, the storm clouds roll in. You need to have a backup activity in mind. If you are a math teacher of 5th grade or higher, I recommend Mathcaching! The folks at www.mathbits.com have put together some excellent resources here.

The way mathcaching works is, you visit a web page called Box 1. There are 3 math problems to solve here. You then use the correct answers to help navigate to a web page called Box 2. The correct answers to this next set of problems will lead you to the next cache page and so on. This is just like finding virtual caches online. It works similar to a puzzle cache on geocaching.com. This activity is a lot of fun. The problems are challenging, and your students will work hard to find the correct answers and will check their work if they get a bum link.

If you have laptops, ipads, ipods or school desktop computers to use with students, you might want to pair them up for this hour (+)  activity. It can be split over several class periods or when you have a spare 10 or 15 minutes. If you have a teacher computer and are able to project the website to your classroom, then this also makes a great whole class activity. I highly recommend visiting here to try out the basic mathcaching hunt on your own first before using it with students. I think you'll be impressed and you may have one more great tool in your arsenal of inclement weather activities!

Happy Hunting!

Educaching hits Philly!

What an exciting time we had at the ISTE 2011 Conference! I had the privilege to work with a tremendous group of educators from all over the world. The session was called Digital Pirates, which is one I have taught before, but this was a 3 hour, hands-on workshop. We used this longer chunk of time to go find geocaches in downtown Philadelphia. This was exciting, because it gave everyone the opportunity to fully understand the reason why students would love using GPS in education. If you are an instructor or educator who teaches other adults about GPS in education, I highly recommend conducting a workshop of at least 3 hours! Do not worry about filling the time...it goes too quickly. Contact me if you need materials or support, or just browse this blog for ideas and resources. The pictures below show the ISTE educators on their geocaching hunt.

 The Black Sculpture (GC2572H)...Scarecrow from Wizard of Oz, anyone? A tiny nanocache was hidden on this piece of art.

 

This cache under the stairs was no match for our team! Love Me, Love Me (GC2W856) was the name of this tricky microcache.

 We used the Geomate.jr receivers...satellite reception was a challenge due to the skyscrapers, but it didn't stop us from a successful treasure hunt!