Mystery Class Challenge
Tony Ward (tward@visionol.net)
Sun, 11 May 1997 22:13:10 -0400
Dear folks: I hope this is the correct address for discussion. My Grade 11
GNS Outdoor Geography Class and I were delighted to be among the winners,
and we certainly congratulate the other successful teams. As I noted in
our successful entry I ran the contest competitively among 5 groups within
the class, and then we combined best answers at the end of the contest and
submitted our entry.
The two sites that we missed --- Zalaegerszeg Hungary and Secunda South
Africa --- were pretty obscure. I would be interested to know if anybody in
fact worked them out. We went with nearby Szombathely Hungary, but in the
absence of any clues that differentiated between these fairly small places
were unable to narrow it down further.
There appears to be a larger problem with Secunda however, as you show in
the final listing a longitude/latitude of 28.00E and 27.83S for this town.
Secunda appears in neither the Times Atlas of the World (9th edition) or
the National Geographic Atlas, and is visible as a tiny village at the
largest zoom only on Encarta Atlas '97. Unfortunately it shows at 26d33m S
and 29d10mE on this admirable resource rather than the listed co-ordinates.
Re-checking the sunrise data indicates that the incorrect co-ordinates were
used to generate the SR times, since the match is exact. But the town is
many kilometers from this site. We went with Johannesburg, which is correct
in longitude, but a little North in latitude. Again; for this site it was
easy to arrive at South Africa as the country, but the always interesting
geographic clues which my students had so much fun tracking down were not
sufficiently precise to lead one to a definitive conclusion, and there
appears to have been a major flaw in the data.
We were lucky in going with Walvis Bay rather than Swakupmund (which fitted
the clues also) but all other sites allowed teams to arrive at a pretty
definitive answer. The Russian site was a classic sleuthing endevour in
particular, and the clues for McMurdo gave rise to excellent learning
opportunities.
I *love* this activity. It seems relatively few are involved in it at the
High School level at present but I am working towards changing this with an
invited presentation for my Durham Board's summer Professional Teaching
Session. As we won the Bertelsmann award from Germany last year as the
finest Public School Board in the World --- we may have been surprised at
this but we are also darn proud of it --- we are anticipating quite a few
outsiders dropping by. I am also presenting again at the OAGEE conference
in the fall, and I know some other teachers got infected after last year's
effort and have followed some of the activities this season.
Pleas let me know if there is another site to which I should forward this
note. Once again, we had a wonderful time, in this and in many other of the
activities. But this Mystery Class is our speciality, and we would like to
help make it even better. As I said last year there is nothing else I know
of that so intrigues the type of student with the calibre to do well in
Math contests for example. Keep up the good work...
Tony Ward VE3NO NYAA StarFest On-Line
tward@visionol.net, tward@spanit.com
71520.1520@CompuServe.com ComputerViz
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