by Emily Canning-Dean
Reporter
Bedford Heights -- Many students look back at their geometry class and remember sitting in a drab room while their teacher lectured about the difference between obtuse and acute angles.
But the students in Jennifer Brown's advanced geometry class at Heskett Middle School had a different experience.
To teach her students concepts such as graphing and measures of central tendency, Brown has introduced them to geocaching, a global craze where participants embark upon a "treasure hunt" by finding caches, or storage places, usually using GPS navigational systems. The caches are found by looking up the longitude and latitude coordinates on the Internet.
"The students truly enjoyed the entire experience," Brown said. "A vital part of the mathematics curriculum is to show students real world applications, and projects like this answer that age-old question: 'When am I ever going to need this stuff?'"
Student Danielle Wong agreed. "I learned that math can be used in everyday life," Wong said.
Brown began to teach students about the skill of geocaching with the assistance of Richard Garey, a member of the school's security staff and a seasoned geocacher. The students collected items to assemble a cache which was then hidden.
Garey hid brass tags at specific coordinates around Heskett's property. The students worked in groups to find the tags. Each tag had a letter on it and when all of them were found, students unscrambled the letters to learn the coordinates of their large cache.
Garey posted the information on the Web site so others could find the cache as well.
"It was fun, and I learned that GPS units have a lot more to do with math than people realize," said student Crystal Olberding.
Student Taylor Sykes Green added, "I learned how coordinates on graphs can also work on a larger scale, like the world."
The students also participated in a geocaching activity which took place in the Cleveland Metroparks on May 22. Heskett students joined with students from six other school districts and worked in teams, under the guidance of Metroparks rangers, to find a cache hidden in the parks.
"The Heskett students had an edge over most of the other students, since they already had practice in geocaching, so they were often the leaders of their groups," Brown said.
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