Integrating GPS & Geocaching

I'm Brian Myers. I'm Mike Ritalik. I'm Becky Hideoed. And this is Al Pelletz, a podcast featuring tips for ag teachers.

We are your agricultural education resource across the web, sharing research-based tips and tackling the tough questions facing agriculture teachers every day. Hey Al Pelletz, this is Brian. I am here with Mike and Becky and once again, we are here by the Al Pellet. And why do we know we're here by the Al Pellet?

Because we got the coordinates on GPS. We are, so today we are going to talk about GPS and geocaching. And that's like a Bitcoin, right, where I can go to the store and give them my geocache and buy a soda pop. Is that right?

Is that what I do with it, Becky? That's maybe a thing you can do with something else. Oh, so maybe not. But luckily today we've got some experts with us.

Rachel Hendricks and John Ricketts, thank you both for being with us here today on Al Pelletz. Thanks for having us. Happy to be here. So before we get into GPS and geocaching, Rachel, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself?

What you got going on there? Okay. My name is Rachel Hendricks. I am an Assistant Professor of Agricultural Extension Education at West Virginia University.

I originally got my start in your now growing up in your Nashville, Tennessee on a small hobby farm. I majored in plant and soil science and then I minored in agriculture education. I taught for a couple of years in Tennessee. I later worked on my master's with Dr.

Ricketts, which is where we got started with this project. And then I later went to Mississippi State University for my PhD. I'm really interested in technology in agriculture. How teachers use technology, what are ways that we can use technology to improve how we teach and how students learn technology?

Excellent. Well, I'm looking forward to a great conversation. You got another guy here, John Ricketts. Tell us a little about yourself.

Well, first of all, get this out of the way. Rachel may hate me for this, but she was in the same FFA program as Taylor Swift. So a little bit of nuggets to the podcast. Yep, that's true.

True. Yeah. I saw her perform at her school talent show. You'll have to do another podcast about that.

I won't let you hijack the show with Taylor Swift. Thank you Rachel for letting me tell that. I'm at Tennessee State University. Like Rachel mentioned, she was one of our first graduate students.

And I'm excited to let her share about the research that she did here and represented us so well in doing so. For those of you who don't know, TSU is one of our nation's land grant universities. We're in 1890 land grant, historically Black College and University. And we basically every day make it our mission to add a little pepper to the salt and pepper of the lily white field of ag education.

So that's actually pretty heavy lifting, but we enjoy it. Great. Thanks, John. Well, Rachel, thank you for being here with us.

So we alluded to a little bit with my outstanding humor regarding GPS, who's not standing humor, they're ready. GPS and geocaching, but tell us, Rachel, what the heck are we talking about today? Geocaching is a global treasure hunting game that uses global positioning system or GPS technology. Geocaching involves people hiding certain little containers, usually their waterproof boxes, or like little plastic bottles that have at minimum a piece of paper, so a little logbook inside, and they'll hide this camouflage it pretty well, and then they'll usually post the coordinates online on the geocaching website.

And then finders will take these coordinates, use their GPS to get to the location and then they'll try to find this hidden container. And when they find it, they'll sign the logbook and hide it back. And that's a basic geocaching method, but some caches are much harder and much more involved to find. So I've had some where I had to solve like the German enigma code to get the coordinates, or maybe you've had to read a certain book to get them, or also you have to perform some kind of physical challenge when you get there.

So there's a wide range of caches that are available. It's a really fun game. That sounds like a lot of fun. So tell us a little bit about this project that you did and use it for educational purposes.

So I had started doing some geocaching and there were several caches that I found where you had to do a little bit of background research. It might have been about the area that the cache was in, or it might have been about a certain subject that the cache hider really loved. And so I realized that we could probably use this as a way to teach people about agriculture and agricultural education. And so the first thing that we tried was a little research study where we hid a geocache outside of the TSU Ag building in a rock fence.

And so we put up a little bit of history about Ag and about Ag at it TSU, and then people had to answer questions in order to get to this little cache that we hid. And so we kind of used it as a way to teach them about what was going on at TSU. We had to make sure we got permission from the police, of course, so that people weren't like, what are you doing here at the rock wall? But that's how it got started.

And we got some real positive responses from people in the geocaching community. And so we thought about, let's see what happens when we use it in the classroom. So for that, we decided that we would teach students about GPS in agriculture. So there's a lot of different uses.

You can use it to track animals, to mark foundries and fences, to practice precision agriculture, where you know an exact spot where you're taking a soil sample from. Someone I went to TSU with was using it to mark and catalog trees. In the National Centennial Park. So we wanted to teach students about how GPS is used in agriculture.

So we put a lesson together where we talked about here's what GPS is, here's how to record and here's how it's used. And now that we're done with this lesson, here's your GPS unit, answer these questions to get the coordinates and then go out and find this geocache. So that was the basis of our study. And we had some creative caches.

The first one was kind of a real basic geocache. It was a little plastic bottle that again, I got permission from school principals. So that again, nobody was thinking there's some suspicious activity going on. What's this thing?

You're getting permission. I never heard of this word. I've always been forgiven. There's permissions and new concept to me.

I need that explained to me sometime. You can tell me about that later on. So you should know that the permission idea was all Rachel's. John, I know you well enough and that did not need to be said.

So thank you. Go ahead Rachel. I'm sorry. Oh, no, I actually did email the TSU police and say, can we hide this in the rock wall?

They're like, we don't know what this is, but okay. Smart move. So what did your principal think about this? When you talk to them and they're like, you want to do hide what on our campus?

Well, we were talking about, you know, we want to help your students in agriculture understand how technology can be used in Ag and let them get hands-on experience with that technology. A lot of people that I talked to were pretty excited about it. They thought that it was really neat that you could use GPS to do that and to go exploring in the world and not just get driving directions from it. And a lot of Ag teachers and students were really excited.

So we got a grant and bought some GPS units and that was like the big part of the day is I'd hand the GPS units out and the kids were like, really, you're going to trust me with this technology? And even the Ag teachers loved it. They got excited. I think it's a really cool idea and approach to using it.

It can be a hobby, but certainly, there's so many different ways that you can relate it back to agricultural industries and how it's actually being used in practice. And so rather than going out and saying, okay, we're going to soil sample and we're going to identify the coordinates for that spot that you can talk about going out and cashing and letting students do it in a kind of a fun and engaging way and then connect it back and say they're doing the same thing with soils and forestry and all different areas. And so a great way to engage students in this whole concept. So I think it's really cool.

And I think it was fun for them too because instead of just going like, okay, well, here I'm at this spot, there's something else to do out there. So I would hide a little plastic container in a bush or if I had a lamppost, a lot of times like a lamppost at Walmart, the little bottom parts will lift up. A lot of people don't know that, but that's a popular geocaching spot. And so I would hide it there or in a bush and the students would be like, I don't know what to do.

And so I kind of want to be like, look, explore. Guess where might this be? And so some of them would start getting creative and they'd knock on things or be like, try that, go move that lamppost. And they'd be like, oh, it's under there.

And then the most creative one that I really liked to watch was I'd taken a PVC pipe and I drilled holes in the bottom. And I'd taken a waterproof match container, emptied out the matches and put the paper inside and I'd drop it in the bottom and see how they could get it out. And I'd leave a little bucket by it. You can fill that bucket up and fill the PVC pipe with water and the match container floats to the top.

But you have to get somebody to hold the holes so they have to work together. So that was one that they had a lot of fun with. And I got a really good picture of students gathered around the bottom covering the holes with their fingers while one poured water in. So that was one that I stole from a geocache that I actually did.

And I was like, this is a great teamwork activity. So I could see somebody using that like an FFA officer retreat or something, like you're practicing teamwork to get this little match container up. I'm just kind of amazed at the variety of things that end up being incorporated in this activity. You talked about team building, you talked about problem solving, you talked about creativity.

One of the things that struck me right away with some of the community piece, like even with that first one, you were educating a community that might not have had a lot of exposure to Agad and kind of on the other side, engaging our Agad community in something they may not have had exposure to the geocaching community. But you were really focused on critical thinking with kind of developing this geocaching activity, right? Yes. Tell us more about kind of how you integrated that piece among all these other things that seem to come out of this geocaching activity.

Well, critical thinking is mainly how we think when we're faced with a problem or a situation where we don't have all the answers. And it's an essential job skill in many different industries in Agad in everyday life, because sometimes things go wrong and you have to make judgment calls or find creative solutions and you don't have somebody to tell you what to do. And that can take practice. We're not good critical thinkers right off the bat.

We have to learn how to make those decisions, how to approach problems and handle our mistakes. So, for example, with this activity, we wanted to see how students handled this unfamiliar situation. Most of them had never had a handheld GPS before. Most of them knew nothing about coordinates or how to read them.

Most of them knew nothing about geocaching. So, we wanted to see how do you solve problems when you don't know what's going on. So, to start with, we made students answer questions that were covered in the lesson. And if they got the right answer, they could fill in the right coordinates.

If they got the wrong answer, then they got the wrong coordinates and it took them to the wrong place. So, if they couldn't, if they couldn't find it, they'd have to go back and fix their mistakes and find out what they did wrong and change it. And then once they did find the right coordinates, and I'd say yes, you're in the right place, they had to think outside the box to find the cache. So, look in the bush, lift up the lampposts bottom.

Try to figure out, you know, how do I get this, this match container out of this PVC pipe where I can't stick my hand down there. And then after, like after we had this experience, I had them fill out a, like a survey instrument saying like, did you use this critical thinking skill? Did you have to think outside the box for this? And we saw for those who had the geocaching experience, yes, we saw critical thinking improvement.

So, getting them active, making them use things that they hadn't ever used before and think a little bit differently about the world around them. We did see improved critical thinking. Excellent. I think one of those things that come to mind for me is rather than just teaching about something, the students are actually doing it.

So, it's really more minds on and they're engaged and they're really thinking and they're processing and they can't get through life, they can't get through class without actually thinking and doing something, rather than sitting there passively. So, I think what a great strategy to get students engaged and active in the process. And a lot of them seem like they really had fun and enjoyed it. They, most of them that I remember, we're pretty excited to like get to pass around the GPS and their little work groups and then go wandering outside.

So, as you talked to all the act leaders that we got listened to this podcast, I'm sure millions of actors write, listen to this podcast every single week. What about... At least three, at least three. What advice do you have them on about how to set up and to use geocaching in their own classrooms to not only teach GPS, but the team building and all the other things you've talked about?

How do I get started? Well, first you can either use GPS. So, we got the really basic Garmin E-Trex, very basic model. They're usually about $100 each or now with smartphones.

You can have students use their smartphones to find these. It's a little bit harder with smartphones, but if you get the right app, you can do that. Also, there's a geocaching app as well. So, you have to get the right technology first.

I would suggest getting whatever's more relevant to what you want to teach. So, if you want to teach them like precision agriculture, definitely get some Garmin GPS. If you are going to just use it for like a fun assessment activity, you know, check your answers, go find the cache, then probably smartphones are good. You're also going to need to know a little bit about coordinates, how they work and how to mark coordinates on your GPS.

And then you'll also have to, as we talked about, get permission from your principal so that like nobody's thinking there's weird, suspicious things going on. You know, somebody's digging in that bush. What's going on? And then teach your students about how to read the coordinates.

So, what are degrees? What are minutes? Things like that? How do I follow this?

It's a little bit of background knowledge is good, but it's really not too complicated. I was somebody that got into this, had no clue and kind of figured it out from trial and error. And then you have to set things up ahead of time. It takes a little bit of work to do this.

You have to like go out and make your geocache container with the paper inside. I think we used stickers too as a little prize and figure out where to hide it and mark it and come up with a puzzle or whatever you're going to use to get students to get students to solve it. But I think it's got a lot of use in different agricultural areas of study. I think just to go out and play with it too, like when Rachel introduced me to it and I started kind of dabbling, you know, that and then your ideas kind of run wild.

Probably my only contribution was I was supervising Dr. Tripoli who's over the Alec Department at UT back when I was at Georgia supervising his student teaching. And his act teacher usually did land surveying, you know, kind of old-fashioned way. And Christopher after stripling wanted to introduce surveying with GPS.

And so I remember still walking around the football field while they were using GPS markers to do land surveying. And his supervising teacher's mind was just long at the time. And so Dr. Hendricks has taken that one little thought and just turned it into something really cool.

So but get out there and just play with it. That's probably the best thing. And then I sit here watching Dr. Myers, as she's talking about all these cool caches she created, his idea is I can see the idea spinning in his head about where he would hide a geo.

The act teachers I know will just go crazy with that idea if you give it to himself. I'd like to hear what some of them are that they try out. That'd be cool. And you can use this all over.

So I would use it in my class when I was teaching to discuss technology and agriculture as part of an introductory agro science course. A lot of my students were suburban. And so they had this one concept of what agriculture looks like. And modern agriculture is not quite what their concept was.

So we talk about how are we using technology to produce food and fiber for the world. You can also use it to do things like catalog and identify trees and plants. So you can make a list of trees and plants on your school campus. So for horticulture and forestry classes, you can talk about tracking animals in animal science and wildlife practice navigation for life for sure.

Wildlife courses. As Dr. Rickett said, you can mark boundaries and land features for landscaping, land surveying, crop science, identify precise locations for things like soil testing. And then you can also use it as an easy or as a fun assessment.

You know, if you don't get the right answers, you're not going to the right location. So it can be just a basic assessment as well. It's also part of case, not the geocaching aspect, but the GPS unit. So the lab quest that case uses have GPS feature.

And there is in the AFNR case Institute, a GPS lesson as well. So that does tie into case. You know, we're coming up on time a little bit, but I think one of the things I'm still a little bit curious about when we think about all the things you can do with this, and we talk about using it for assessment, we talk about all the different content you can tie to this, but a really key element of what you were looking at was the critical thinking. You talked about the teamwork and the communication and those skills that are just so craved in the workforce right now.

What advice do you have for teachers about how do we really make sure students are also thinking about that piece in addition to the content that they're working with the geocache around? I would say definitely make it so that students don't have all the answers. Give them something that they're going to have to think about for a little bit or use their curiosity to try to find that a lot of students didn't know what they were looking for or how to get to this thing. And so they had to test it out.

They did have kind of a safety net, which I think made them feel a little bit better. So I would be like, no, that's, you know, you're not in the right place, go back and try again. So that they learned that their mistakes were not, you know, we're not major. They can learn from those mistakes.

And they could, they realized that they could solve problems. And that's a big part of critical thinking is assessing this and thinking, what do I need to do to solve this? What do I need to do to get the information that I need? Yeah, I certainly can see where you could gradually make it more difficult or more challenging as students gain some confidence and some experience with it.

And yeah, definitely. And it was fun to watch as they use different methods for solving these geocaches. I intended for them to float that matchstick container to the top. But one of the schools I went to, they actually took a stick and somebody used their chewing gum and attached it to the stick, down the pipe and managed to stick the matchstick container on the gum and pull it out.

And I was like, well, I didn't see that coming. You know, the bucket was right there, but they got it and it was they solved the problem on their own with the tools that they had at hand. And I was very impressed. Well, that is exciting.

The other thing you talked about here, and I don't want to go, this gloss past this, but it's a great tool in the classroom. But it's also a great way to promote ag literacy, because if I understand, there's a pretty large geocaching community, not just around the country, but around the world. And if you can set up one of those, one of those in your own, you know, own school that's on that network that provides information about modern agriculture, as you were mentioning there, Rachel, that's something that you're providing literacy to the entire community, not your students. It's set that up like what kind of questions do you want to have that are challenging enough, but also easier for the general population to answer to be able to find that particular cash so that they can learn more about, you know, agriculture in general.

And maybe your FFA chapter, high school agriculture program, with that larger community. So there's a community outreach component to this as well as learning the actual technology, which I like is really, really exciting. Oh, definitely, definitely. And you never know if you log on to the geocaching website, you may find caches really close to you.

And there's usually a lot on college campuses and in towns, and it's a great way to get people involved and to learn a little bit more about what we do in agriculture and in agate. Just be careful where you stick your hands. Yeah. Yeah.

That's really good life advice. Just in general. Oh, goodness, John, on that note, we were going to wrap this up. This has been an outstanding conversation.

Rachel, John, thank you so much for sharing about your research and about this exciting teaching tool that we have to really talk about technology, because it's really easy to talk about technology. Sometimes it's difficult in our classrooms to provide applications so they can learn a bit a little bit more about it. And so this is a great tool not only to teach about technology, but also we saw this as a potential ag literacy community building type tool as well. So make sure you check out all the social media here about this topic on GPS and geocaching, comment in on all of our social media outlets and reach out to Rachel and John to learn more your contact information will be there.

So Rachel, John, thank you so much for being with us today here on Al pellets. Oh, thank you for having us. Thank you, yes. You hope you've enjoyed this episode of Al pellets.

Check out our website for more information on this topic and to learn more about our guests. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram stay connected and be sure to subscribe to our podcast so you'll never miss an episode. For Mike and Becky, this is Brian here by the Al pellets saying thank you and we look forward to seeing you again on another episode of Al pellets tips for ag teachers.