Discussion: World Orienteering Day stories

Bring 'em.

I was really happy with the turnout we got in Bethel! No one here ever does orienteering and so it was great to see a bunch of new kids come and try a short course and the Maze-O. Everyone loved it and we had a reporter from Danbury come and ask us questions and take pictures of people running around. It's the first time I've seen kids come to a WCOC event. :)

OCIN event at St Patrick's Park in South Bend, Indiana had 105 starts on 3 courses, mostly home school students from the surrounding area (a few parents and adults).

Results are here

Here are a few photos from this event.

We were amazingly lucky with the weather, as moderate to heavy rain over-spread the entire state, but left our site as one of a very few dry spots until the final few minutes of control pickup and cleanup. Several kids were lucky enough to see an opossum while on their course.

34 Girl Scouts and Leaders (and one brother) showed up for orienteering at Marie Kerr Park in Palmdale, California. It was sunny and crazy windy. The Diplomas almost blew away, but Harvey saved them. Made a new map for this event. Previously had only done a few training events using a satellite image.

The course was 15 controls with about 45 minutes available. No scoring, just run around and have fun. Gold stickers that said "I found them all" went on the Diplomas for anyone who punched all 15.

I think my favorite part was during the instruction when I pointed out that since orienteering is a sport, that meant they were allowed to run. That definitely generated some excitement. The GS safety rules don't allow for running very often.

We were able to give each participant a patch, since I had leftovers from this year's annual youth event. Everyone really enjoyed it and were very appreciative.

Have a look at Blair's log. It was quite an achievement.

CSU hosted our usual Wednesday night Park Race, at Menotomy Rocks Park in Arlington, and had 18 runners on the advanced course, two on the beginner.
http://attackpoint.org/racesplits.jsp/race_24785

The course was three loops of ~1km, and everyone did all three but in different orders. Thanks to a bit of a technology glitch we had to resort to hand-timing, but everyone had a great time. We had at least two first-timers, and two groups showed up who were new to CSU but not to orienteering. Great weather, and only a little poison ivy.

We had 17 at Dartmouth, about half were students with the other half staff and from the local community. The Valley News was there and did a nice article.
http://www.vnews.com/World-Orienteering-Day-at-Dar...

At Cambridge Street Upper School in Cambridge MA, we had to split WOD across multiple days (still not done!) so that we could reach every PE class. Yesterday we had two classes; on Thursday we had four. Still hoping to reach another 6, though we are probably rained out tomorrow, and today too.

The format is 3 short courses on the school grounds (new map), with electronic punching. It's going really well. The PE teacher is advising us on how to get orienteering to be a regular middle school sport in our town. We've identified a coach who already works at the school.

We worked with a brand new school, Putnam Avenue Upper School, in Cambridge, MA yesterday: 130 participants, plus a dozen younger kids from the co-located grade school that were curious at recess. New map by Ed Despard; 3 short easy courses with electronic timing. We had trouble with our printer for the first 2 classes, but swapped it out for a different one before we got the really large classes. This was a bit of an audition for us, as we'd like to do an after-school club in the fall; we passed with flying colors, and the responsible teacher is already talking about logistics for allowing the kids to travel to other maps in the city. A great day!

A couple teachers who saw us and asked what we were doing seemed interested in working with us for the younger kids. I think we need to turn WOD into WOW next year, because we have too much demand.

This middle school is fed by three K-5 schools, one of which is Morse School. We've been working with the Morse 5th graders for half a dozen years, so every time I asked the class who had orienteered before, 1/3 of them raised their hands. The PE teacher, who had never heard of orienteering before this, was surprised.

It was great (and necessary!) to have David Bryant and Alex Shaffer helping out. It made a huge difference in having a smoothly running event!

At the Morse school in Cambridge, the two fifth grade classes taught 6 other classes, one at a time, half an hour each, grades K-4. We used the CSU map of Magazine Beach, but the smallest kids didn't even use a map, and just did Animal-O. Electronic punching. Isabel Bryant and her friend Becca Shaffer helped out. A big success - the other teachers who were introduced to orienteering through this day are interested in bringing it into their classrooms in the future.

The Newton Country Day School borrowed pin punch controls from us and put on their own event independently, involving candy and the map of the school grounds made by Ed Despard.

It wasn't quite World Orienteering Day, but we put on an intro event on a new map by David Bryant at Foss Park in Somerville last Sunday afternoon. We did not have many attendees, but those that came were significant. One was a science journalist who is writing a book about human navigation, and she was planning to observe yesterdays WOD event at the MIT day care. Here is a photo of the event workers; I get to post here bc of the awesome WOD jackets:

Patrick McNeal of NEOC put on an event for preschoolers yesterday at MIT; 52 people participated. He did animal courses, and even had the older kids work with a map he made using one of the WOD OCAD licenses. He reported that the teachers were enthusiastic about the activities and want to do more. All around, the WOD events seem to raise awareness amongst educators and develop new relationships that might well lead to more orienteers! I'm excited about the new maps that were created for WOD.

Evalin did a great job for the WOD event in Bethel (WCOC land). Here's a link to the local story:

http://www.newstimes.com/local/article/Bethel-kids...

Evalin also spent each afternoon last week giving an orienteering presentation to different classes in different Bethel schools, in preparation for yesterday's WOD event. Nice job Evalin!

Barb gives me more credit than I deserve - I opened OCAD and was quickly overwhelmed. Instead, I fired up trusty old Adobe Illustrator and converted a Google satellite image of the school's playground into a usable, but very non-standard, map.

Today no fewer than 4 parents thanked me for setting up the event and asked when they could try orienteering themselves. I've pointed them to NEOC and will remind them when the fall season kicks into gear.

It is really great to see these local stories, similar ones are coming in from all across the world. In particular it is great to see that having a common brand/title/World Record objective maybe makes it easier to get some media interest.

Fantastic work by all!

From Sue Hawkes-Teeter:

A third grade class from Berne-Knox-Westerlo Elementary School came to our EMPO World Orienteering Day at Pleasant Valley Farms. I wish I could express the excitement of the kids as they did a map hike of a white course and then challenged each other on a short sprint course using e-punch. The weather cooperated, the kids were great, the teachers want to continue with orienteering – a truly successful and rewarding day. In addition to this class, a homeschooled student did two challenging courses, a new adult enjoyed trying the sport for the first time, and some of our regulars liked having another opportunity to do some orienteering.

Photo

I was able to re-run my same course from Saturday, and I was able to beat the "superman" time by more than 10 minutes :)

Summary of World Orienteering Programs – Orienteering Unlimited

Orienteering Unlimited (Ed Hicks) was involved in 10 programs For World Orienteering Day/week.
A total of 613 students participated in programs conducted at the following locations:
Garrison School - Garrison, New York
5th grade program - 15 students
6th grade program - 27 students
A full color map was created by Orienteering Unlimited for the program. Each two hour program consisted of a series of activities (name tag game, map symbol relay and a PowerPoint presentation. After the indoor activities students proceeded to the school grounds where they did a 4 loop Motala course. Each student went home with a sample of the map and a WOD certificate showing their participation in the event.
A newspaper reporter took pictures and is writing a report for a local newspaper.

Orienteering Unlimited also created a full-color map of the Susan B. Wagner High School in Staten Island. 90 students from the Junior Air Force ROTC did the Motala loops on WOD Day. An additional 40 students did the courses as part of a field day on the Friday after WOD.

Two programs were conducted at the two Half Hollow Schools on Long Island. Half Hollow School East had 41 students while Half Hollow West had 33 participants.

Sharpe Reservation in Fishkill New York conducted programs with three different schools. Two from Beacon, New York and one from Pelham, New York. A total of 350 students did courses at this location.

Theodore Roosevelt Educational Campus in the Bronx was the site of the most unique of the events. The event took place in a swimming pool and the surrounding area. Orienteering Unlimited create a map of the pool and the room containing the pool. Students had to navigate to various places in the pool where they participated in various swimming activities/skills. In the areas outside of the pool they navigated to various places in the room where they answered questions or did activities related to swimming. There were 25 students in the class. This has been an ongoing activity at the school for the last five years.
This program has been done at the school for the past few years and has also been presented several times at the annual New York State Physical Education Conference (NYSAHPERD) .

An additional program was done at the Brewster, New York High School during WOD by the JROTC instructor.

Several other schools were interested in participating but due to other scheduling issues, particularly state testing, they were unable to do so.

We had 76 out in downtown Whitehorse. Sprint terrain, but the longest course was 4.7 km.
http://www.whitehorsestar.com/Sports/athletes-cele...