GPS tracking has changed our everyday lives for the better.
For people who are still new to the concept, and who are hands-on rather than book learners, a new traveling exhibit called GPS Adventures Museum has hit the market. It’s visiting Canada and New York and California and Mississippi this summer, and it might be making its way to an educational institution near you.
The exhibit, designed for people age six through adult, is meant to be a back-to-basics overview of GPS navigation and GPS tracking and its many practical and fun applications. The feature covers GPS history, its current uses and where the technology might be headed in the future.
The lessons are introduced through an interactive game of geocaching, which is like a worldwide electronic treasure hunt, using handheld GPS tracking and navigation devices for location clues. All of the “caches” are family friendly. They are little surprises hidden in containers around the world. Ten-year-olds can play alongside senior citizens in the adventure game, that combines problem-solving, technology and travel. There are currently more than one million active geocaches available throughout the world just waiting for discovery.
Museum visitors get “lost” in a 2,500-square-foot maze. Geocaching can be practiced in any or all of four simulated environments: a park, a heavily-populated urban area, a serene country landscape and a historic site similar to one a family might visit on vacation. Each setting is unique in its latitude and longitude GPS tracking coordinates. Wall panels are seven feet high and up to 12 feet long and the graphics include tall buildings, bridges, streets, rivers, lakes and mountains. The “dead-ends” have equally interesting images, including waterfalls, cliffs, walls and holes.
Exhibit-goers need GPS tracking technology, critical decision-making skills and good memories to find their way out of the maze. At the end, kids are encouraged to use their imaginations and design a GPS tracking application of the future.
The museum display is created by Groundspeak, a major developer of the geocaching game, and it is meant to recruit new geocaching fanatics.
Said George Guyver, a new fan: “Once I get the GPS tracking unit in my hand, the adrenaline kicks in and I don’t give up until I’ve found the cache – or died trying.”
GPS Adventures Museum has been at Maryland Science Center in Baltimore since mid-February. May locations include Turtle Bay Exploration Park in Redding, CA and Boonshoft Museum of Discovery in Dayton, OH.
Source: Groundspeak , Maryland Science Center
