The students in Mrs. Janico's eighth-grade World Cultures class participated in an interactive gold search on Sept. 19 to learn the importance of differentiating between absolute and relative location.
The classroom was turned into an artic environment complete with sound effects, cold temperatures, and a frozen tundra landscape displayed on the projector. One set of students acted as cartographers and had to make maps for their partners, the geologists, to indicate the location of a gold deposit. However, the cartographers didn't realize that a huge snow storm was going to come through and change the environment so that the landscape/classroom wouldn't look the same as it did when they created their maps. Upon entering the classroom after the "storm," the geologists were faced with overturned chairs and desks, making it difficult for them to use the maps their peers made unless the cartographers happened to realize the small longitude and latitude numbers on the classroom walls.