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Best Practice Name: Geocaching
Duluth Parks and Recreation offers geocaching to youth
The City of Duluth Parks and Recreation has been offering Geocaching for children in the summer and after-school programs for the past 2 years. Geocaching is basically high-tech treasure hunting. It involves using a GPS unit to find items called “caches” posted on www.geocaching.com that are hidden by other cachers utilizing latitude and longitude coordinates. Currently, there are over 287,000 caches in 222 countries. Once a person or group finds a cache, they sign the log in the cache and if the cache is large enough, they can exchange an item if they want to. Afterwards, they register their find on the www.geocaching.com website.
Many of the caches involve hikes of more than an hour, which is a great way to get youth active while making it fun. Also, the youth participate in what is called “CITO” (cache in, trash out), teaching them to be great stewards of the environment. Usually, we bring groups of 10 or less on geocaching trips so that all of them get a chance to learn how a GPS works. We also do geocaching lessons at the recreation centers where the staff hide film canisters for youth to find on the park grounds to give them more experience in using GPS units. We have found that the 10 years and older age groups are able to understand the technology, however, younger children enjoy the activity as well.
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