Pearl Creek Elementary students Dayan Mitchell, 11, left, and Caleb Gorda, 9, retrieve a container full of candy and geography materials during a geocaching exercise on Friday afternoon, April 22, 2011. John Wagner/News-Miner
A Pearl Creek Elementary student configures a GPS unit before setting out on a geocaching exercise on Friday afternoon, April 22, 2011. John Wagner/News-Miner
Pearl Creek Elementary fifth-grader Aaron Gould carries a GPS unit and a geocaching container full of candy and geography materials during a geocaching exercise on Friday afternoon, April 22, 2011. John Wagner/News-Miner
Students in Marcy Kuntz’s multi-grade classroom (grades four through six) teamed with “little buddies” (first-graders) Friday afternoon to locate treat-filled caches hidden around the school grounds with handheld Global Positioning System receivers.
They searched behind bushes, under school outbuildings, in brush along the woods’ edge and around the soccer field — and no team came back empty-handed.
Each of the dozen or more teams found a plastic cache containing four plastic eggs filled with candy and stickers. There was a pencil for each first-grader and a packet for each older student complete with a world map, a guide to geocaching and a geocache logbook — perfect if they decide to continue the worldwide treasure hunting game on their own.
But before the teams — made up of two first-graders and two older students — were cut loose on the playground, they learned about geocaching, a game that uses GPS to find hidden objects — from some experts.
When students in Lisa Esch’s first-grade class raised the idea of holding an Easter egg hunt with their buddies, fourth-grader Tanja Gens volunteered her mother, Anupma Prakash, to lead it.
Prakash is a professor of Remote Sensing Geology and Geophysics at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
The professor enlisted graduate student Kate Schaefer to co-teach, and Kate drafted her husband, Wes, to help set up more than a dozen borrowed GPS receivers with longitudes and latitudes, and printouts with a written hint and coded clue to find a cache.
Wes positioned the caches around the school grounds shortly before the afternoon hunt.
Dayan Mitchell, 11, Caleb Gorda, 9, and Sam Johnson, 7, were disappointed on their first attempt to locate a treasure.
“Some kindergartners found it during their recess and hid it somewhere else,” Gorda explained.
But after a little discussion, it all worked out.
“They told us where they hid it, but it took all the fun out of the GPS,” Mitchell said.
That’s when Wes came to their rescue and the boys were set up with new coordinates and a printout to log into their GPS receivers, and the hunt was on again.
Before the students ventured outdoors, Prof. Prakash and Kate explained the history and basics of geocaching, which is practiced on every continent from Antarctica to North America.
Geocaches can be found at the Pyramids, on Denali’s summit and in more than a million locations around the world.
“People hide caches in film canisters and Nalgene water bottles,” Kate said, holding up examples
of each.
The caches usually contain souvenirs and a logbook to be filled out by the finder.
Not only does geocaching get treasure hunters outdoors having fun, when they return home they can share their stories and photos online.
As the students learned more about GPS receivers, satellites and the signals that make them work, their drive to rush outdoors and start the hunt mounted.
Once free of the classroom, the lesson evolved into an outdoor adventure on a beautiful spring afternoon.
“It was such a wonderful way to end the week,” Kuntz said.
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