Mr. Miller's Bug Tracker  

We begin a new adventure in room 162. Mr. Miller’s class at Chalone Peaks Middle School are learning about geography by participating in a fun geocaching activity. We have purchased several “travel bugs” that we are sending out to partner schools around the world. This site will be used to track our bug’s progress toward their destination.

Each bug has it’s own page on this site where anyone can find information and track each bug’s movement across the planet. Our students will be doing various geography and math related activities over the next several months as our little friends try to complete their mission.

We published a blog post about our activity on our classroom blog looking for schools to join our project. All the bugs now have destinations, but we are still interested in finding new partners for future releases, so please feel free to leave a comment and request a bug!

Jake in Hong Kong

Kallista Jake has officially travelled more miles/kilometers than the world is round! Ranger G75 has taken Jake with him as he travels the far east doing his job of training pilots. So far, Jake has visited Japan, China, and Taiwan on his journey. You can read about Jake’s travels by visiting his geocaching.com page.

The Zion Sphere of Mystery has been picked up by a new geocacher and it is already having a strange effect on her. Cacher peigimccann says,

“I picked this up on my way down the spine of the Santa Cruz Mountains from San Francisco to Santa Cruz. But wait, it’s rolling off the table, oh no, it’s trying to get out of the house! I’ll have to put it in a lead box until I can move it on! Stay tuned! Argggghhhhhh!”

She quickly moved The Sphere along and placed it into a new cache called, The David Locke Victorian Mansion. A place with a mystery of it’s own!

The Huzzahnian Dragon has made its way successfully to Comox Valley, Canada and to the students of Ms. Smith’s class!  We are so excited to see one of our bugs find its way home. We Skyped with the Huzzahnians themselves shortly after the discover of the Dragon. Ms. Smith has a wonderful class of students that were very excited to find the cache with the Dragon inside.

They made a fantastic video documenting their discovery.

This morning we launched a new TB headed to a classroom in Kansas. The bug is named John Brown’s Secret after the famous abolitionist. Ms. Ratzel’s class at Leawood Elementary School in Leawood, Kansas are waiting anxiously for its arrival. Both Mr. Miller’s class and the class at Leawood will be providing some background for our bug’s adventures along U.S. Highway 80.

We hope that the bug visits several caches along the way that are located on, or near, the California, Oregon, or Mormon Trails that led settlers from the Midwest to the West well over a century ago. John Brown was in Kansas at the beginning of the period in American history just prior to the start of the Civil War. Kansas was a lightening rod for both anti and pro-slavery groups. The resulting violence earned the area the nickname “Bleeding Kansas” from eastern newspapers.

We will create a story surrounding John Brown’s actions there while learning some history and geography along the way. You can follow his adventures on Geocaching.com.

Jake at the controls! (photo by RangerG/75)

Jake’s made his way out to Hawaii and toured several caches thanks RangerG/75. He even got a tour of the cockpit of the plane! Jake will be joining RangerG/75 on a few more adventures before he takes him back to the Islands and says goodbye next month. Jake has been collecting kilometers all along the way. He has now travelled farther than the Huzzahnian Dragon. His record may be hard to beat

The Zion Sphere of Mystery made it’s way into the (appropriate) hands of a physicist in the San Jose area. SpinningCompass has quickly placed The Sphere in a bug hotel (a popular site for travel bugs) with instructions to move him on to Illinois as quickly as possible.

You can check out more details on these bugs adventures and the travel tales of each of our TBs by visiting geocaching.com

UPDATE (10/28/10): Jake is nearing 10,000 miles! His map keeps getting larger too

From RangerG/75:

Since I had to go to work for a day and the weather was pretty good I thought that I’d take KJ with me so that we could add some miles and post some pictures. We flew from Los Angeles International Airport to the Memphis International Airport. Our route of flight kept us on a southerly track across the country. KJ saw California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Tennessee from 33,000 feet. I was hoping for a clearer day but there was a lot of dust and haze across our entire route of flight. The pictures that I’ve posted were taken over Southern Arizona about an hour into our flight. Tomorrow we do our road trip to the Sierras. I expect that we’ll be gone for three days caching and maybe doing a little fishing. We’ll have to wait and see about the fishing since the weather forecast shows that it might snow!

Kallista Jake continues to have quite an adventure as it awaits the flight to Hawaii next month. Jake’s in the hands of RangerG/75 who recently posted a note on Geocaching.com about Jake:

Log Date: 10/17/2010

KJ just can’t sit still. Another weekend and more fun. I did an 8 day fishing trip to Mexico a couple of weeks ago and caught a lot of big yellowfin tuna, yellowtail and dorado. There was so much fish that I decided to have it professionally packaged. So KJ went with me to San Diego to pick the fish up and get it home and into the freezers. I brought home about 300 pounds (look it up for kilos) of fresh frozen fish. Yummy! KJ will continue to travel later this week. Stay tuned!

Jake in San Diego! (Photo by RangerG/75)

After a slow start, Trev’s Tag is also on the move, having spent less than 24 hours in a cache in San Luis Obispo. EmilyRN discovered Trev in a cache named, uh . . . Doggy-Doo Park. She has promised to move it along quickly and supply us with a photo. Go Trev!

Trev's home for a night

Flickr CC

Good news for students in Texas and Illinois, both The Zion Sphere of Mystery and Ramenstein were picked up by a single geocacher this past weekend. His geocaching name is jsingewald and he has promised to move them on quickly. We are looking forward to charting their progress!

UPDATE: They have both been moved into new caches and now await the next geocacher to find them! (10/13/10)

From Ramenstein’s log . . .

Dropped this traveller off in a nice cache hidden alongside a dry creekbed in east San Jose near Alum Rock Park. Posted a few pictures of the new hiding location. I hope the kids monitoring this traveller enjoy their project.

Image: ‘Bride Of Frankenstein‘ 
http://www.flickr.com/photos/95492938@N00/257491210

Vancouver

The Huzzahian Dragon was picked up from it’s cache yesterday by a geocacher named VCTrails. He is on a trip from San Luis Obispo to Vancouver and has promised to deliver “The Dragon” safely to a cache in Canada. He will be stopping along the way and picking up some more caches. This appears to be a perfect match and we wish VCTrails a safe journey

Find out more by reading The Dragon’s log.

UPDATE: VCTrails has posted several photos of The Dragon on his adventure. Visit the log link above to view! (10/10/10)

UPDATE#2: The Huzzahnians have written an outstanding blog post about The Dragon.

UPDATE #3: The Dragon has arrived in Canada!!!! He/she/it is in a cache near the Vancouver airport. (10/15/10)

Image: ‘Morning Mist at the Lagoon‘ 
http://www.flickr.com/photos/95572727@N00/292751230

Our Kallista Jake bug headed to Australia, is in the hands of a geocacher named RangerG/75. He will be taking “Jake” with him from Southern California to Hawaii later this month and drop him off.

Jake had a chance to visit another clasroom on it’d trip. Here is the quote from the official log . . .

KJ’s TB spent the day with Mrs. Svensson’s 6th grade class at Hermosa Elementary School in Rancho Cucamonga, CA today. They enjoyed learning about Geocaching and how travel bugs get from place to place!

Image: ‘HAWAII ….‘

http://www.flickr.com/photos/11704283@N07/3186030403

John Alexander Dowie CC 3.0 License

We are releasing a new bug this week. It’s destination is a high school in Zion, Illinois. We’ve generated a mystery story around the bug’s origins and ultimate resting place. I will share the stories we develop as the bug finds its way to Illinois. We’ve also asked the geocachers involved to give us some information about The Sphere’s affect on them while it is in their possession. By the time it reaches New Tech High, we should have quite a story. The students there will need to finish it for us by revealing The Sphere’s ultimate reason for heading to Zion.

Jake's adventure begins

Kallista Jake has been snatched up by a geocaching teacher and is currently in Southern California awaiting placement in a new cache. The teacher that found Jake will be taking a photo of it with his class and we will share that here when it happens.

We have released the Huzzahnian Dragon into the wild! He, or is it a she (?) is headed north to Canada and Ms. Smith’s class. Morningstar Elementary in Fort Worth, Texas is the destination for Ramenstein. Ms. Lawson’s students will have fun finding him when he arrives near their school.

We also received a very nice comment (found on this blog) and blog mention from geocacher cumbyrocks. He is the owner of the cache where Trev’s Tag will hopefully find its way. Next week we shall be releasing two more bugs – one headed for Chicago and the other for Kansas! What fun