GeoCaching

Today during Com 435 we had to spilt up into five different teams to discover clues in order to solve a problem. We learned the other day in class about geocaching and how it is starting to be used throughout our country and how it is becoming apart of our culture. For those of you who dont know what geocaching is it is like a treasure hunt game, but you use GPS devices to help locate the clues. For our geohunt in class we had five teams that went out into the field to find the clues and then had a group of four students in the room to collect all the clues and decide what they meant. It take a while for the groups to figure out how to use the GPS machines and what they were suppose to report back to the central team. This is where it was very important to have great communication skills. The central team needed the clues to be clear and quick inorder to beat the other class section teams. We learned that there were many different ways to communicate the clues to the central team. Some teams used Facebook, others used texting, and one group even took pictures and emailed the clue into one of the members of the central team. I believe that all of the different methods were beneficial because it didnt limit everyone to the same type of technology. People could use the technology that they were must comfortable with, which in the end lead to a successful treasure hunt. It took us about 15 minutes to figure out as a group how to use the tools to our benefit. Then when we finally discovered what we were suppose to be looking for we all came together very quickly and figured out the saying. The saying was Purdue's new motto: "Going Green".

I believe that this activity was a lot of fun and really showed the class what new technology can do for us in the future.