Tech Savvy Kids Summer Camp

Today is the last day of my Tech Savvy Kids summer camp. In addition to working with digital cameras, Scratch, ComicLife and creating clay animations, students have geocached both on campus and in the local community.

Students are pretty well versed in finding waypoints already programmed in their GPS, so today they created and hid their own caches across the school campus. Working with a partner, students researched an animal or famous place and wrote 5 to 6 clues about it. Next, they typed their clues in Microsoft Word. Finally, they set out across campus hiding, marking, and naming their caches.

After exchanging GPS units, students located their waypoints, tracked down their caches and raced back to the computer lab. Most groups found their caches independently while others required some help from their friends. Using the Internet, campers evaluated each clue, looking for keywords that would help them in their search.

Here is one of the caches that was created.

Clue 1: I am a city.
Clue 2: There is a labyrinth within me.
Clue 3: An earthquake once destroyed a large part of me.
Clue 4: I have a lot of mosques.
Clue 5: I have the most Koran schools than any city in my country.

I can’t wait to try this activity with my 3rd and 4th graders during the school year. I think it would be neat to have 4th graders write caches on a topic 3rd graders are studying (i.e. explorers, US states) and vice versa.