* G E O C A C H I N G *

     A new unit and study is the wonderful world of geocaching! Lets just say that before I learned about this, I did not even know that it had existed in the first place...its actually pretty interesting. To lead up to learning about geocaching, we first had to understand a lot about the GPS unit. How it worked, why you used it, and why it is important. It was good information and I now understand a bunch about GPS systems. I will admit though that I do need to brush up on my ability to enter coordinates into the GPS, but I will practice.

    Geocaching is an outdoor activity in which participants from all around the world use a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver or other navigational techniques to hide and seek containers called "geocaches" or "caches"that are hidden everywhere in the world. Our class decided to test this out so we became participants in the hunt. To do so, we went to the official geocaching adventure site, which was...http://www.geocaching.com. Here we set up an account, punched in our zip code and found hidden geocaches near us. 

     Some caches were harder to find than others and sometimes we did not even find the one we were searching for. Even though it was disappointing, we found it to be more successful for us to forget about it and keep searching for other ones. The first time we went out in our geocache hunt, we did not find anything! It was tiring and bumming. The second time however, my group found one. I was proud of us. No offense to whoever invented this cache but it was a boring one, there was an eraser and pencil grip. At least we found it though. We kept trying to search for others after, hoping to find more, but we were unlucky.

This is a picture of the geocache we found!

     During this unit I learned a ton about the GPS and its significance to many different things. I learned when and where they can come in handy as well as all the things it is composed of. I studied how to work it and also how to properly calculate different waypoints with it. It is simpler than I thought. I still need to refresh my memory on some things about it though.