JAY – Armed with a global positioning system and the knowledge of exactly where Jay is located on the planet, fifth-graders are plotting their geocaching hunt.
Students in Rob Taylor’s gifted and talented class at Jay Middle School have been studying math, science and geography as they learn how to use a GPS, or global positioning system. They’ve turned their lessons into a game that has become popular around the world: geocaching.
The word geocaching (pronounced geo-cashing) combines “geo” for geography and “caching” for the process of hiding something, a cache. A cache is used in hiking and camping as a place for concealing and preserving provisions.
The idea of geocaching is to have people set up caches all over the world and post the caches’ geographic coordinates on the Internet. GPS users can use the coordinates to find the caches.
“It’s a very noncompetitive sport,” the teacher said. “It’s all about getting there.”
There are more than 119,000 geocaches in 212 countries worldwide, explained student Lexi Deering. The closest one to Jay is in Kineowatha Park in Wilton.
The eight fifth-graders in Taylor’s class know the coordinates for Jay and plan to post them on the Internet so others may go looking for their cache.
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During the past four months, for one hour a week, the students have learned about longitude and latitude and how to figure out the degrees and minutes in determining a town’s location.
They’re able to explain their work very well.
Kaitlyn Smith said Jay is about halfway between the North Pole and the equator, at a little more than 44 degrees north in latitude. James Douglass added that the town is a little more than 70 degrees west in longitude.
In geocaching, Andrew Stearns explains, you take something out of the cache you find, and you put something else in it.
In this case, the students have primed an old military can with gray paint for the cache they’re creating, and will draw a black paw on it, in honor of the school’s mascot, a Siberian tiger.
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Dakota Paul opened the waterproof cache box and took out some of the Jay memorabilia inside: pencils, stickers, erasers and a plastic megaphone. As is usual in this pastime, there also is a logbook for visitors to make entries.
Ben Hartford said game rules prohibit placing alcohol, weapons, food or drugs in a cache.
To satisfy another requirement, the students attended a recent selectmen’s meeting to ask permission, which was granted, to put the cache on Jay recreational land.
Before that board meeting, the students went snowshoeing with teacher Patty Schoen to search for a good spot for the box and found a couple of options. Once the snow melts, they’ll place the cache.
One of the rules of geocaching, Samantha Hutchinson said, is that you can’t bury your cache. So a good place, she said, is a hollowed-out tree or a rock with an overhang.
“It needs to be visible – but not too visible,” Deering said. “You have to be looking for it to find it.”
More information on geocaching is on the Web at www.geocaching.com.
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