Students get direction at ECTC camp

Kelly Richardson

Children at the geospatial camp at the Elizabethtown Community and Technical College work on creating maps and treasure chests Thursday.

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By KELLY RICHARDSON krichardson@thenewsenterprise.com ELIZABETHTOWN — While many educational camps work to get students where they want to go in an academic and career sense, a camp at the community college helped get students to their destination in a physical sense. Elizabethtown Community and Technical College offered a geospatial camp this week. Campers learned how to navigate using compasses, maps and GPS equipment, as well as mapmaking and using geographic information systems. Students also traveled to Mammoth Cave and Bernheim Forest to test some of their newly acquired skills. The children were outside quite a bit during the week, which is an important aspect of the camp, said Lisa Deavers, recreation supervisor at Barren River State Park. It also ties in technology with the outdoors, which made it attractive to children. “I feel that being outside is very important for our youth,” Deavers said. Jacob Newton, 12, was interested in seeing what exactly the camp would offer when he signed up. The idea of the “treasure hunts” they did in the camp, using the navigation tools, sounded appealing, too. “I wanted to see what we’d do, and I thought it’d be really cool to look for stuff,” Newton said. The majority of the students hadn’t used a GPS, global positioning system, or done the hunts, called geocaching, where students use the GPS to find hidden objects, called caches. Lane Ryan, 8, was one of them. “I had no clue how to work a GPS,” Ryan said. But on Tuesday, as Ryan’s group hid their caches for other groups to find, she was showing Deavers how to do a few things on the computer navigation systems. Deavers said it’s fun to introduce children to something new, and they in turn do that for her. “They always teach you something as well,” she said. Kelly Richardson can be reached at (270) 505-1747.