Our Worldwide School Project -South Butler Primary School Room 307

March 2, 2009
This whole idea started with geocaching!
Geocaching is a high-tech treasure hunting game played throughout the world by adventure seekers equipped with GPS devices. The basic idea is to locate hidden containers, called geocaches, outdoors and then share your experiences online. Geocaching is enjoyed by people from all age groups, with a strong sense of community and support for the environment. In Butler alone, there over 500 of these hidden caches and over 700,000 worldwide.
On September 20, 2008 I took this concept and incorporated into my classroom. I was hoping to have the children to get outside more, learn a little more about longitude and latitude, learn about the different areas around them, and have fun in the thrill of finding these items. At the beginning I hid two caches for my class and for other geocachers to find along the Butler-Freeport bike trail. As of March 3, 2009 our sites have been visited by over sixty people.
In these caches, I placed two travel bugs. In my case, the travel bugs are stuffed animals with a computerized ID numbered tag placed on them. They can be tracked with a classroom or home computer by the students as they move across the United States and the globe. Right now, one of these travel bugs is in Santa Clarita, California and the other is near Weirton, West Virginia and soon to be in Arizona. We have a giant map outside of my classroom and plot their movements across the United States.
Then Greg suggested that we do some type of multi-cultural project for the month of February with our classroom. I had the idea to expand our geocaching project and go worldwide with it. My room mother, Karen Nunna contacted several other mothers, and we had a craft day. Each child made bracelet with their initials on it. This bracelet was attached to a stuffed animal along with the travel bug.
Then I went on the world geocaching forum site and emailed this letter.
Hi! Maybe you could help me out or put me in contact with someone that can. My name is Larry Cooper. I am an elementary teacher near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania of the United States.For a third grade class project, we would love to place our travel bug in a geocache in your country. We would love this travel bug to move across your country so we can learn more about your beautiful country plus some world geography. If you can take pictures for us along its way, we would be grateful.We would love to hear from any teacher or anyone that might want to help us out and we would reciprocate the idea for you or a class and place a travel bug sent to us.Thank you from a fellow teacher and geocacher,clockdoc52
Immediately the replies from all over the world started to be emailed to me. So far fifteen different countries with seven responses just from the United Kingdom alone. Here’s a list so far: Australia, Belgium, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, and Hawaii of the USA..
So far some of the responses have been in Italian, Spanish, and French and historically from places such as Plymouth, England; Tongeren, Belgium (the oldest city in Belgium); Madrid, Spain, and Rome, Italy.
As far as I know we might be the only classroom in the country doing this on a worldwide basis at such a extent:

Australia

Gday Coop Not a problem.

If you can give me an email address, that your class has access to, I will see if I can help
them with their geography and some pictures of the countryside, as my wife and I are
heading off on an approx 7000km (4200 mile) geocaching trip lasting about 4 weeks,
covering a large part of south east Australia. We head off in less than 3 weeks time. We
are doing the trip by motorcycle, and heading off from Gladstone in Central Queensland,
down through central Queensland, New South Wales, then across through to central
South Australia, up to a small town called Coober Pedy, then down to the southern coast,
across the Great Ocean Rd to Melbourne, then back up probably through central Victoria,
New South Wales, and Queensland and back home.
We will be seeing a vast array of different countryside, from flat plains, to steep, rocky
outcrops and tall sandstone cliffs overlooking the Southern Ocean. If time permits, we
will pass through 5 capital cities, and will also head up to some alpine regions. We are
taking a laptop, with mobile internet access, so we should be updating cache logs and
forums on a daily basis. We are also taking video and still cameras. We hope to find
around 340 caches on the trip.
I'm only too happy to help out your class learn about Australia.
Knowing how inquisitive kids are about things at that age, (and by 3rd year elementary, I
am guessing they are around the 8 to 10 year old age group) heres a little bit about us. I'm
married to Jenny (we just celebrated our 21st anniversary) and have 2 daughters (Skye,
19 and Alexis, 18) Skye has a son of her own (Cameron, 10 months) I drive trains for a
job, hauling up to 10000 tons of coal in trains roughly 1 mile long, and Jenny and both
our girls work at Hungry Jacks (Burger King in USA) I actually work away from home
for anything up to 2 weeks at a time. But I usually get back home about once every 7 to
10 days, sometimes for up to 5 or 6 days. We live in the central Queensland coastal city
of Gladstone, which has a large port which exports a lot of things, but mainly coal.
Attached are some pictures of what we are traveling on, and what I drive for a living. If
you would like any more information, about anything related to caching, or our upcoming
trip, you only have to ask. I will give you my email as well, just in case,
mudrat100@hotmail.com If any of your class would like to ask me anything about living
in Australia, they can email me directly, or go through you.
Cheers,
David


France

Français :
Bonjour,
Nous serions heureux de pouvoir vous aider à faire profiter vos étudiants des beaux
paysages de la France donc nous acceptons avec joie si vous le voulez toujours emmenez
votre TB dans une cache française. Mais je crois que cela ne serait pas une bonne idée de
le laisser dans une boîte parce que souvent en France les caches n'ont pas beaucoup de
visite suivant si la cache est ancienne ou pas et le vol des caches est assez fréquent donc
nous nous proposons CTG57 et moi-même à le faire visiter différentes caches et
différents paysages avec y compris les photographies prises sur le terrain! En échange de
cela serait-il possible qu'on vous envoie un Tb nous aussi pour le faire voyager?
Amicalement
JamesAdams
XXXXX
English :
Hello,
We would be happy to be able to help you to share with your students of the beautiful
landscapes of France thus we accept with enjoyment if you always want it take your TB
in a French hiding place. But I believe that it would not be a good idea to leave it in a box
because often in France hiding places have a lot of following visit if the hiding place is
former(ancient) or not and the flight(theft) of hiding places is rather frequent thus we
suggest us CTG57 and myself making it visit various hiding places and various
landscapes with including photos taken on the ground! In exchange for it would it be
possible that we send you Tb too to make it travel?
Thanks to Reverso for the translation!
Friendly
JamesAdams


England

Hi ! If you put my name on it which is _________ then it will
get to me. I will take a photo of some of our pupils when it arrives and one of me
releasing it. I will also take it down to the Mayflower Steps and our Lighthouse and send
some photos. It all sounds like great fun. Our children are all getting some new email
addresses soon so it would be great to set up some links.
We look forward to hearing from you. If you could send any future emails to my school
address which is _____________ that would be great. Take care
from

South Africa

Hi there, Clockdoc852,
Thanks for your email - of course we can help. We travel fairly often across South Africa
- are planning another trip early July to Kwazulu Natal and have to cross quite an
extensive area of South Africa to get there and will definitely be caching all along the
way.
If you would like to post the travel bug to us, we can take care of it from there.
Our address is:
Do please let us know if you are going to send it to us.
All the best,

Belgium
greetings
im not a teacher (maybe a career option for next year tho...) but im more then willing to
drop your TB here in Tongeren, the oldest town in Belgium. Tongeren is over 2000 years
old.
look up

Finland

Well hello there!
I would love to help you. I'm not a teacher, but I send your message forward to those
Finnish geoachers, that I know that are teacher. I hope they contact you or me, but if they
don't, maybe I can put the travel bug on its' way. In which kind of hurry are you?

England

Larry
I always knew 'Men were from Mars' and you are living proof.
Glad that we can help your class out in this project and I promise we will find a suitable
historically and geographically interesting cache for your bug to start from in the UK.
My details are as follows.......


Sweden

Hi Lar!
We're looking forward to receiving your travel bug here! Here is an email address for
Stig, he's in Norway and really nice, he's also a coin collector, so he should be more than
willing to help a bug move along :)
Here is my address:

I'm at work right now, so I need to keep this short, but looking forward to hearing from
you guys again :)

Canada

We're in -
Kris

and don't worry - I'll add a goal tag for the 20 pound bug for him to
come visit you.. lol

New Zealand

Hi Larry.
Just a quick note to say I received the TB - thank you - very cute. I
have not done anything yet but will make sure it is checked out of LAX
& into AKL before visiting some NZ sites. :)
Kevin

Italy

Hello fellow geocacher,
sorry for the late response, but lately I have been pretty busy between work and family
and geocaching, beside reviewing, is very "low".
Please feel free to send me as much coin you want. I will be happy to put them near
Milan or in southern Switzerland (Tessin), since I have hidden caches in there. In July I'll
be near rome and I can drop the coin in my caches about 100km from Rome.
I'll give you my work address: