Geocaching as a means to teachbotany to the public

摘要

Do you find it difficult to get your students to go to the library? Or to get them excited about studying course material about botany when they think everything they need to know is in their smartphones? Isn′t it even more challenging to get the general public to use botany books in the library and raise interest in botany? Yes, but now ways to include smartphones and GPS devices in education suddenly make plants cool to study and attractive for a broader audience. There are many applications and worldwide initiatives that use smartphones and GPS devices to teach students in elementary schools (Huang, Lin, and Cheng, 2010), high schools (March, 2012) and universities (Santos, Hernández-Leo, and Blat, in press) about plants. One aspect all those initiatives have in common is that they are established in regular courses, and students have the incentive to get a good grade at the end. But smartphones and GPS devices may also hold promise for educating the general public. What is their incentive? For many people searching for and finding a treasure outside is incentive enough. And they are willing to go some distance literally and intellectually for the most prized ones in a relatively new activity called geocaching.