Geocaching is kid-friendly with Geomate.jr
(Credit:
Corinne Schulze/CNET)
Designed to get kids away from their video games and into the great outdoors, the Geomate.jr is like the Easy-Bake Oven of handheld GPS devices. It is a simple handheld device that distills the GPS experience down to its core function--telling you where to go--and adds a fun goal for kids to focus upon: geocaching.
Geocaching is sort of a game of hide-and-seek, in which participants hide containers (caches) or tiny logbooks (microcaches) around the world and make the GPS coordinates of the caches known so that others may find them, usually on the Internet at sites such as Geocaching.com.
You never know where you'll find a cache or what's in it. This one held a rubber chicken!
(Credit: CNET)Once you find a cache, you record your name in a log book. In larger caches, you'll sometimes find small trinkets that you can take (such as toys or small odd currencies), as long as you leave something of similar value. Put the cache back where you found it and you're ready to find the next one!
The Geomate.jr takes the hassle of logging onto the Internet to download cache data out of the equation by preloading over 250,000 North American cache points for out-of-the-box geocaching.
