Hide a cache for personal use ONLY

[rollintide]

I am a teacher and have been talking with my students about geocaching and using GPS devices. I would like to take my students out to find a cache together. However, I can't take them off school property to do this. I was planning to hide a cache on school grounds, and let them find it. This could become a problem with strangers coming onto school property looking for the cache.

 

My question is... Can I hide a cache, using the geocaching website and features, but keep it hidden to public viewing? This would allow me to hide the cache on school property, but outsiders wouldn't come onto school grounds looking for it.

[+Sapience Trek]

Are you planning on using GPS devices or a smartphone with the geocaching app?

 

If you're using GPS devices, then just grab the coordinates of the caches you've hidden and let the kids know. No reason to enter anything onto the geocaching.com site at all.

 

If you are using the geocaching.com app, you won't be able to list private caches. You can use the app or other GPS apps from the various stores to manually enter the coordinates and navigate that way.

[+NanCycle]

Can I hide a cache, using the geocaching website and features, but keep it hidden to public viewing?

 

No.

 

But you can hide something for the kids to find and just use other means to let them find it. School's own website, maybe. Or just print out the information.

[Pup Patrol]

I am a teacher and have been talking with my students about geocaching and using GPS devices. I would like to take my students out to find a cache together. However, I can't take them off school property to do this. I was planning to hide a cache on school grounds, and let them find it. This could become a problem with strangers coming onto school property looking for the cache.

 

My question is... Can I hide a cache, using the geocaching website and features, but keep it hidden to public viewing? This would allow me to hide the cache on school property, but outsiders wouldn't come onto school grounds looking for it.

 

No.

 

If you use the Groundspeak site and features, that means you want to have a cache published by Groundspeak. That would mean that it would be for "public" consumption.

 

You don't need to use Groundspeak or to publish a cache. Hide the object, note its coordinates, and then let the kids know those coordinates in some way. Print them out on sheets of paper, or whatever.

 

 

B.

[+K13]

My suggestion for this situation is to take your coordinates on school property and begin a cache submission page with full write-up, just like any other cache submission. DO NOT click the submit for review button. You can then print that page, which will look like those on the website, but it will be visible only to your account. Use the printed pages as handouts to the class. Later archive the page, since it can't be published on school property anyway.

[+NYPaddleCacher]

This is what my son did at school (6th grade) about a week ago.

 

"Five locations, five historical ciphers, four teams, three teachers, and a group of very energetic upper elementary students. Today we used math, geography, history, language, movement, and teamwork to scour the park behind our school for a hidden treasure. Each cipher revealed a set of coordinates which sent them to a location where another envelope awaited with another cipher to solve and another set of coordinates and so on."

 

They didn't actually use lat/long coordinates but created a grid on a map of the park and the "coordinates" had an E/W number and a N/S number. He said that "most" of the "caches" were easy to find once they got the right coordinates. It wasn't "geocaching" but he really enjoyed it and it sounds like it was pretty educational. I don't know how well it would work in a public school and my son's school is next to a small town park (which, surprisingly doesn't have cache in it).