Geocaching
Cost and Suitability: Free with in-app purchases, suitable for teens User Rating: 4.4/5 on Google Play Store What's Needed: Smartphone and headphones Summary: Geocaching is the world’s largest treasure hunting game that lets you find secret locations, solve challenging puzzles, connect with others, and explore the world. In the app you can see details with descriptions, recent activity, attributes, and hints for each geocache. Navigate to the cache using a map, compass, or driving directions. Live Search updates nearby geocaches as you move and you can search for geocaches using codes, locations, landmarks, and neighborhoods and even sort by distance. Plus you can message other players and adjust personal preference settings for distance and navigation. Unlock more adventures with geocaching premium which allows for offline map availability with multiple map options, trails maps to pick the road less travelled, and sharing photos of your geocaching experience. In OE: GeoCaching is an excellent app to supplement outdoor education by engaging students with nature in a competitive, fun way. Teachers can place geocaches on school grounds or at locations of field trips and register them online. If they want to support community building, they can also utilize existing geocaches and add a prize for the next geocacher to find. Each geocache serves as a destination to find, with place-based and experiential learning taking place as students journey through the world around them. Educators can also store additional lesson materials in the cache itself to be found and answered by students or prizes to reward those who find it. Goosechase
Cost and Suitability: Free and suitable for everyone User Rating: 4.2/5 on Google Play Store What's Needed: Smartphone(s) Summary: Combines scavenger hunt with smartphone technology with Goosechase! This app lets you create and facilitate customized scavenger hunts. First, log into the administrator interface at www.goosechase.com and create a game. You can choose a mission from the mission list or add your own custom mission. Next, gather participants and have at least one other person per team download the Goosechase app. Finally, get hunting! In OE: Why not send your students on the most exciting and place-based educational scavenger hunt they have ever experienced? They can learn to become more aware of their surroundings, community, and environment through these customized missions by challenging their knowledge and their ability to work together. Personalization of missions also allows educators to cater to individual lesson plans and class size to create more holistic and integrated learning opportunities. This app relates back to the character, and environment pillar of OE. It provides ways of knowing and discovering their local environment. This attaches them to their place and sense of community of those who take care of it. Picture THis
Cost and Suitability: Free with in-app purchase, suitable for everyone User Rating: 4.5/5 on Google Play Store What's Needed: Smartphone with camera Summary: Picture This allows you to instantly ID plants and get plant care tips. It can identify 10,000+ plants with 98% accuracy, and uses an AI engine to learn constantly. Plus you can track all the plants you’ve seen and share your photos. In OE: Picture this is an app that helps you teach students about the world around them with a quick snap of a photo and an ever-expanding library of reference photos. Though not a location-based game, this app can be gamified and combined with a scavenger hunt styled lesson using photos as evidence of students' experiential learning and engagement. This app relates back to the curriculum, character, and environment pillar of OE. It provides information about how to care for and track the plants students have found can foster environmental stewardship as well as give knowledge of what exists within their place. HyperLocal Weather
Cost and Suitability: Free, suitable for everyone User Rating: 4.3/5 on Google Play Store What's Needed: Smartphone Summary: Powered by Dark Sky weather this app for Androids provides current weather conditions and high accurate hourly and minutely hyperlocal weather forecasts with live radar maps. It offers information on sunrise and sunset timing, moon phase, temperature, “feels like” temperature, wind direction and speed, UV index, visibility, pressure, humidity, and chance of precipitation. In OE: While this isn't considered as a game, this app still made our list as it is critical to plan for the weather when doing outdoor education. While not being known for its innovation, it is still a staple app that enables outdoor education. Being able to see the forecast change in real time has a lot of interactive elements that could potentially turn into a game as well. This app relates back to the environment pillar of OE and gives students a sense of how their local ecology can be affected by the weather. |