Fresh air, sunshine, GPS
By Bobbi Mlynar (Contact)
Originally published 01:43 p.m., April 29, 2008
Updated 01:43 p.m., April 29, 2008
Photo by Adam Vogler
Spencer Worthen, 10, and Hallie Hawkins, 10, use hand-deld global positioning satellite receivers to locate a hidden cache of goodies Monday, April 28. The Emporia Christian School fourth graders were geocaching, an outdoor treasure hunting game using GPS.
Students at the Emporia Christian School spent Monday morning traipsing around the old College of Emporia campus looking for caches.
Guided by Garmin Etrex Global Positioning Systems from Emporia State University, children from third through eighth grade divided into small groups and followed written clues as they used the GPS equipment to get their bearings. The goal was to find items that had been hidden the day before by ESU Associate Professor Joan Brewer of the Health, Physical Education and Recreation Department.
Brewer and her PE Methods students have been teaching PE at the school for about four years, she said.
Monday’s outing introduced students to a new hobby that combines exercise and education in an entertaining form; it is one that families can participate in together, brewer said.
“I went to a convention and got an opportunity to try it,” Brewer said. “I just loved it.”
Her college students responded in the same way, and when Brewer found she could make arrangements with Garmin for additional Etrex units, she brought geocaching to Christian school students.
Geocaching is a treasure-hunting game that uses a GPS to hide and seek containers with other participants.
On Monday, students were fascinated by the satellite-driven units that guided them around the campus. If they were walking the right direction, the numbers of feet shown on the unit steadily dwindled; if they were walking away, the numbers shot up. The units gave the youngsters coordinates and information they needed to be successful.
“They’re catching on,” Garmin representative Natalie George said as the group she was accompanying took off for the old Anderson Library building.
“This will tell you where to go,” she said to them. “We want the number to get smaller. We’ll know we’re going in the wrong direction if it gets high.”
And, she confessed, she had no idea where the caches were hidden. She was looking for them just as the students were.
“It’s like a scavenger hunt, but it’s using this to teach them directions,” George said. “It gets them to exercise while they’re playing a game. This is telling us coordinates.” Map-reading and learning to read compasses also enter into the geocaching.
Parents of the children who took part Monday morning were to come that evening to school, where the youngsters would teach them how to geocache.
The exercise and fresh air facets of the game are important to Brewer and her student assistants.
“I think so many kids these days are ‘nature deficient,’” Brewer said. “… There is actually a term they’re using — ‘nature deficient.’”
Geocaching gets the children outdoors and trekking around large areas of the countryside to find the treasures.
“Geocaching is a worldwide outdoor activity,” she said. “All around — Emporia, China. I take my GPS unit with me and I could go looking for these little treasures hidden in different areas.”
At geocaching.com, participants and others interested in trying out the hobby can enter a city and see how many items have been cached in the area. Anyone with a GPS unit is welcome to look for the treasures and later record what was found.
“It’s simple and easy to get started,” Brewer said.
Participants also may bring along trinkets from their home areas, like a sunflower keychain identified with a “dog tag,” to leave for the next geocacher to find.
“As long as you leave something, you can take something out of the cache,” she said.
Geocachers also have introduced a “travel bug” to the game. The travel bug is an item that is being sent from one area of the country to another — or to another country entirely. The person who plants a travel bug leaves a note telling the bug’s destination, and another geocacher headed that way takes it along as far as he or she is going. Later, it will be picked up again and carried along until its reaches its destination.
“We have one travel bug that’s crossing the country now, trying to make it to Washington state,” Brewer said.
Comments
Post a comment
We allow registered users to post comments on this Web site. Our goal with this feature is to encourage thoughtful discussions about the news stories. Using the comment feature to make random attacks on people is not acceptable. Emporiagazette.com neither endorses nor guarantees the accuracy of any user contribution. Responsibility for what is posted or contributed to this site is the sole responsibility of each user. To learn more about our posting policies please read our User Poster Agreement Policy.
(Requires free registration.)