Geocaching

[Chroelle]

Well do any of you Geocache? I just really got smitten with this thursday, so I am going on my first real "self-inspired" cache tour tomorrow. Simply wanted to hear some more if any of you spend your time searching the woods nearby for modern age treasures.

[Drasir-Vel]

I've heard about it from the Stuff you Should Know podcast.

[Chroelle]

It is kind of fun, in a weird kind of nerdy way... When I try to describe it to people at work I say: Its an outside walk with a purpose.
The whole community feels a bit like finding yourself in a Harry Potter Fanclub - outsiders are called Mugglers, and the whole thing is based on abreviations, and you get the feeling that you should propably know some kind of secret handshake or password... But when you open up your first map and see how many caches are near you - you get blown away (if there are many in your area of course).
Here is a picture of how many caches are in my extended neighbourhood...!!! (PS - the green ones are caches - and well...everything else is caches too....)

But then you see go and see how many are near Krakow...

[Scythe]

All I can say is... eh, what??

[Chroelle]

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=geocaching

[Scythe]

"Enable javascript to use LMGTFY."

[eMTe]

Games people play...

When we've been kids me and my then-friend were playing the imaginary olympic games. Since there was only two of us we werent able to mimic all olympic competitions and, besides, weve been living in a countryside. There was a deep forest around, my friends' father designed a rope for him to swing and apart from this artificial object anything we could find near us that was artificially designed for human use (except houses of course) was a pile of stones in neighbourhood, left from some house construction.

We were able to find about 40 different activities to play and compete. We were running, fighting, jumping, finding objects, swimming, rope-swinging. We even invented imaginary rock bands and later decided which name of the band is most "cool". This was also part of our "olympic games".

I just dream that modern kids will be as inventive as we were back then.

[Chroelle]

I have no problem believing that they are - as I work with them everyday. It seems however that the adults are the ones that have the problem. If you need to leave the house so your kids can go to the woods and play around, then chances are that the kids will end up sitting in front of the TV instead. (And mom and dad will sit with their stuff, thinking that the kids should be doing something else than playing videogames and watching TV.)

Let me say it this way - there are lots of public playgrounds, forests etc in our town - and I almost never run into any of the 700 kids that go to my school - and I only run into their parents at the shops... (Oh and I am always with Anna when I run into them, so my conscience is clean. )

[eMTe]

This is what I tried to show. We didnt have electronic goodies back then.

On the other hand, you can be creative sitting by the computer, creating games, drawing, programming, inventing things, writing a blog, whatever, but it's not the same kind of creativity. People move indoors in recent times.

It doesnt apply to geocaching of course. It tries to link outdoor activities with electronic devices, and this is actually quite cool.

[Chroelle]

Indeed. And I love how you just more or less created a teaser for my blog.

Which is about doing creative stuff on computers with kids, instead of seeing it solely as a way to play games. Games are good, but computers are way more useful with kids than most teachers, social educators and parents realize.
I wrote an article about geocaching for the blog which might be published next wednesday (wednesday is my publishing day), so I hope some people will open their eyes to the usefulness of this outdoor electronical "game".