Green Lake 2011: Jim Zillmer – Can we go outside?
There are a few ground rules for today’s hunt:
Don’t trample any flowers or rip apart any trees or bushes. All containers are easily accessible.
Replace the container exactly where you found it.
Caches are located between Kern and Bauer Lodges.
So, this was fun. We were given a set of problems to work which gave us coordinates for 8 different caches. All of the solutions led to coordinates which could be input into a GPS device. The units we used did not have an electronic compass built in so we had to be moving in order to be pointed in the right direction by the GPS. Our biggest problem was organizational – we just ran out there like a bunch of giddy little girls and never really checked off the ones we found and we didn’t keep all the coordinates on the same sheet of paper.
My colleague and I talked afterward about the fact that you could really tailor this kind of thing for anything you are studying. Give the kids some drill and kill problems and just make sure that you somehow make the solutions into the coordinates you have hid the caches at. Jim used old plastic pill containers or Altoids boxes that were covered in duct tape. Some he ran a wire through so he could hang them from trees or bushes and some he put magnets on so he could stick them to something metal. Inside the cache he had candy and a little sign in sheet. I would imagine that you could even include a clue to the next cache.
Jim offered up these web-sites as useful to check out:
