Victor Sammurtok students get lost
Wilderness navigation GPS course challenges students in Chesterfield Inlet
Darrell Greer
Northern News Services
Wednesday, October 26, 2016
CHESTERFIELD INLET
A GPS course offered by Glen Brocklebank has students earning academic credits while learning valuable skills at Victor Sammurtok School in Chesterfield Inlet.
Todd Sammurtok, back, and Kimberly Tanuyak took top spot in a 4km GPS wilderness navigation course with a time of 53 minutes. - photo courtesy of Glen Brocklebank |
Students can earn one credit for 25 hours of instruction, as part of the GPS course entitled wilderness navigation.
Brocklebank said the course is offered to students in Grades 9 to 12.
He said although he's offered GPS in the past, wilderness navigation is a new careers-and-technology studies credit course.
"We've tried to tie GPS in with other things in the past, but this the first time it's its own course, with its own course code, that we can offer students," said Brocklebank, adding that the course fits into the unspecified, or additional, credits students need to graduate from high school.
The school provides seven GPS units, with another 12 borrowed from the Kivalliq science educators' community.
"We also had some kids bring in their family's GPS, and that gave us enough so that we only had a couple of kids having to team up to do the course," said Brocklebank.
He said the students were given an introduction into how to mark waypoints.
He said he walked around town to decide which things had to be marked so they could come back to them.
"First we showed the students how to mark a location and label the names so it just wasn't 001 or 002. The following week we showed them how to find the waypoints."
"We'd give them a latitude and longitude co-ordinate, show them how to program it into the GPS, and then how to use the GPS to find the waypoint."
After that, students went out on the land in search of eight different waypoints.
The students had a piece of paper with a topographic map on the back of the area, so they could see the general location where they were going.
At each waypoint, there was an orienteering hole punch for the students to mark the paper with their own unique design.
Brocklebank said the course started near the end of September, and he hopes to keep it going until close to the Christmas break.
"It's an interesting mix because some of the students knew how to use a GPS, but a lot of them had never touched one before," he said.
"The stuff we're doing, however, is pretty new to all of them, so, at the end of each class, we talk about what they learned."
He said the students have been taking to the course very well.
"The end goal is to have a sort of Amazing Race as a culminating activity and, because we have a number of students who are interested in search and rescue, being able to use a GPS and map together are skills they want to have."
