Tuesday, 24 November 2009

have been busy

Ahh, the struggle of the end of the year. We had our first meeting with 30 of the 32 students today. They seem eager to get out there and get going. We started off handing out the letter to parents and the permission form. And then went through various scenarios with them, I then realised that the letter should have contained a disclaimer about what happens if their child does in fact become lost. We had a hour to fill in, so I managed to find some question sitting on the net for students to go through and find the answers relating to geocaching, http://edweb.sdsu.edu/courses/EDTEC570/cooltools/gps.html what different terms mean and so on. I had to change some of these, especially some which related to some unfortunate sites, also included an incident in Auckland earlier this year, just to get some students to see the seriousness of what we are planning to do.

We used this time as teachers to go into a room next door and discuss what is happening from today to next monday, what needs to be done, what needs to be carried out, and what will be happening thursday as we go into town to get the amazing race going. We have a plan that we will start off with and location, realising that it will be around 1 hour to 1 and a half hours to complete the devonport section.

I am working out what to do with the 2degree SIM cards at the end of the project, plans were that we would hold on to them to be used for another project next year, but after talking with the students, they seem keen to take a memento from the project, this could be the 2 degree SIM cards, they will also get a geocache item to take with them as well.

Working out prizes for the top group as well came up today, and to be honest I did not even think about that.

Also dealing with getting the GPS units for this. Went down to dse powerhouse today to pick up the units, only two had turned up, 4 are still in transit, and the other two were coming from other stores and had not yet made it, or knew where they were. I managed to get one from a store close to me, and the other from the store that is at the super centre. So I have four with me at the moment, 4 hopefully arriving tomorrow. I have two others from previous activities and interest. So we will have 10 GPS units when the project starts

Just thought of a cool thing to do at the park. GPS writing, students will have to follow a set of coordinates to write a word out in the park. They wont know what the work will be as they will have to decrypt it using there code sheets at the end. Its makes use of a big space :) YES!

Map of auckland domain, showing tracks :)

Looking at creating a book of things for the students to help them along there journey

A pamplet about geocaching

John campbell episode about geocaching, have email them for permission to use.

general geocaching resources

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