After 6 months of waiting (I saw this on a website 6 Months ago and have been waiting ever since) I finally had the opportunity to find my first geocache today at Ballam Park in Frankston. After logging in the the Geocache website and typing in my postcode I found that there were several geocaches near my house with one of them being in a park that I have exercised in for 3 years!! We have some friends who are right into geocaching Eddie and Michelle and they came down with their portable GPS and off we set to find the loot. It was set up as a multi location find where you had to solve the (simple) puzzle to find the co-ordinates of the cache. We found the cache in a hollow of a tree very well hidden. In the cache was an assortment of toys (this cache was aimed at families) and a travel bug which you need to log that you have found and then you need to find another cache and add it into that for someone else to track and find.

It was great fun and of course my mind went to how could we use this at school? There are heaps of applications obviously for geography, outdoor and environmental studies and physical education.  But also an easy way to start up some global conversations with people as you discuss travel bugs and other track-able items. Using literacy skills in creating and framing puzzles for your caches that you create and helping students collaborate by groups creating caches. All you need is handheld GPS unit which cost about $200 on ebay for a Garmin GPS60 which is a basic monochrome unit and access to the Internet to get the clues for the cache hunt.

Some random ideas are that this could be useful for extension students or hands on learners for engagement???