Heading outside, geography students are geocaching
October 2, 2019
In an outside of the classroom learning experience, freshmen Olivia Paulk and Caroline Caruso collect locations and coordinates as part of the class’ experience geocaching. AP Human geography has utilized the lesson for years, to teach students about GPS, and relate some of the class’s terms to real life.
Varun Saravanan and his fellow AP Human Geography students head outside to experience human geography outside of the classroom, and in a way teachers hope benefits the students more. The class teaches students about geography of the earth, and geography of people, two concepts that the geocaching experience can help students understand.
AP Human Geography students head outside to experience human geography outside of the classroom, and in a way teachers hope benefits the students more. This activity strives to be both interactive and fun, while also learning about absolute location.
Freshmen Ashwin, Luke Martin, Mika Lal, Kyathi Uyyala, and Shannon Hogan walk across the football field, using their GPS to search for their checkpoints. Students taking AP Human Geography traveled to every corner of the campus, to participate in the class activity, geocaching.
Putting their GPS knowledge to the test, students in outdoor education are hiding geocaches around the community as they learn about GPS usage. Similar to treasure hunting, geocaching is an outdoor activity where participants use a GPS to to find hidden objects.
Freshmen Shannon Hogan, Ashwin Javvaji, Kyathi Uyyala, and Luke Martin jott down the coordinates of locations they found by their GPS. The students tried to find all the locations, to see who had the most by the end of class.
Freshman Olivia Paulk and Caroline Caruso walk across the football field hoping to find more of the desired coordinates , and possibly have the most in teh class. Students competed to find the most cashes located around campus using their GPS.
Hannah Bueler and Jacqueline Wallace are working to find a list of coordinates, by using GPS location. Each year, AP Human Geography students compete to find every location first, and use the experience to learn about concepts taught in the class.
Conducting a unit of GPS and GIS systems, AP Human Geography students spent Monday and Tuesday outside around the school geocaching.
“They just got through learning about all the different vocabulary and read about GPS units and GIS units,” AP Human Geography teacher Gary Mumford said. “We’ve actually just taking it and applying it to real world stuff,”
Helping students get real world applications for concepts outside of a textbook, students used a GPS device.
“We get learn about absolute location and longitude and latitude,” freshman Ashwin Javvaji said. “We actually get the feel of going around in the field and learning about it.”
However, for freshman Shannon Hogan, the lesson is a new take on something she’s already familiar with.
“We can learn how to track and coordinate things,” freshman Shannon Hogan said. “We’ve been mainly learning about GPS systems. [It doesn’t help me understand better] because when we are driving we use GPS’s all the time anyway.”
