As part of Technology Tuesdays at Fletcher Mrs. Palermo’s 5th and 6th grade students have been learning all about geocaching.
Geocaching encourages kids to explore the outside world around them and also offers lessons on how maps work, geography, and estimation. Kids search for geocaches by using GPS receivers to located the assigned waypoints (latitude and longitude) This type of exploration prompts discussions on creating graphs, measuring distances, and other math concepts as well as the geographical lessons. After learning the basics of geocaching, the students then started to explore other aspects of the computational thinking skills needed for geocaching.
Most recently, the students took on the challenge of solving Geocaching Mystery Caches. With traditional caches, students use given coordinates to find caches. With Mystery caches, the students have to first solve problems to get the correct coordinates.
Thanks to a premium Geocacher team members, Jokeerus, who have designed Mystery Caches especially for children, our students had an opportunity to solve Mystery Caches. These geocachers have designed these too do their part to encourage the younger generation to enjoy geocaching. As a result, our students are able to solve problems to virtually find geocaches hidden in Utah.
The students used their skills to work hard at decoding and solving a variety of mystery caches. They solved a variety of codes using pig pen cyphers, tap code, and many others. After solving the puzzles, the students where then able to check with the geocache owners to gain a “find” for the geocaches.
The students did a great job and earned the reward for finding the caches.
If you are interested is solving these or other caches, check out these links to the Mystery Caches series hidden. It is a great experience, and we were appreciative of the work done by Team Jokeerus!
- Jigsaw -Kid Puzzle [#1] GC96X5W
- Emoji Imagination Kid Puzzle GC96X6D
- Angelic Symbols -Kid Puzzle GC9746H
- Ka-Chow! Kid Puzzle GC97F05
- Animal Tracks -Kid Puzzle GC9745Y
- Coded Candy Kid Puzzle GC9746W
- Lego Lingo Kid Puzzle GC97T7G
- QR-dinates Kid Puzzle GC97W37
- Chocolate Pigpen -Kid Puzzle GC97VZF
- Tap Code -Kid Puzzle
- Folding Fun Kid Puzzle GC981RE
- Incredible! -Kid Puzzle GC9839W
Angelique Fairbrother is the Digital Learning Coach at Franklin West Supervisory Union. She is a regular contributor to THE FWSU STORY. You can follow her on Twitter @FWSUtech.
The FWSU Story 