PLEASE VOTE: Which cover do you think we should use for Mission:Explore Food, our next book?

Mission:Explore Food is now available to pre-order on Amazon, but we’ve not finished our cover yet. We’ve got some more work to do on the final thing… but which of these three different designs do you like the most? Your opinions are very welcome.

Cover X

Cover Y

Cover Z

Thank you.

Is playing hide-and-seek in shops too guerrilla?

I really enjoyed reading Professor Richard Phillip’s article on curiosity and fieldwork in the most recent edition of Geography, the Geographical Association’s main journal. He has a lot of positive words about both the Mission:Explore books and website. I’m looking forward to meeting him next month as part of a ‘think tank’ style workshop on fieldwork in the the EPIC department of geography at the University of Sheffield.

The paragraph I found most interesting suggests that some of our mission-based guerrilla geography challenges may be a little too guerrilla…

“Mission:Explore comes with a tongue-in-cheek ‘WARNING’ on the front – ‘This book is dangerous’. But the back cover issues an invitation: ‘Become a guerrilla explorer and extreme missioner with missions that defy gravity, see the invisible and test your mental agility’. In fact, the book is a little dangerous in places, and not always productively so. To develop the latter example, shops and some shopping centres are private spaces, subject to tight regulation, and it is not always possible for children and young people to use them for games such as hide-and-seek! This underlines the need to approach fieldwork suggestions such as these critically.”

What do you think? Should the (implicitly geographical and enquiry-based) game of hide-and-seek be played in commercial spaces, or is this just too naughty?

Collaborate in the Mission:Explore Open group

Thanks to Goldie who has recently joined the Open group on Mission:Explore and shared a draft assessment sheet for using the site in schools. The Open group is a space that is open for teachers to join, collaborate and make missions. To download the assessment sheet and to start collaborating you can visit the Open group here.

 

Mission:Explore at #camped12

Good to see from John Sayers that the participants in this weekend’s CampEd event up in West Yorkshire are getting some good exposure to Mission:Explore – melting marshmallows, cameras getting emotional, moor spectrums and more are on the cards…
Here’s the Explorer Mission packs in action….

All roads lead to Leeds…

Alan from the Geography Collective went up to Leeds last week in the rain to do the final talk of the year for the Leeds Pyschogeography Group. After spending the week before cycling up and down the canals in Leeds for another project it was interesting that his train went straight over the place where he’d been cycling the week before – looking up at the trains….
Here’s a link to Alan’s talk – let us know if you want anything explaining…. or Alan to come and do a similar talk to your group…

Thanks to Tina for the invitation….

Mission:Explore at Teachmeet Clevedon

Thanks to Noel Jenkins for giving us a mention in his talk at Teachmeet Clevedon recently… We like Noel’s exuberance :)

Something for your school newsletter

Teacher? Collaboratively make missions in our open group

If you are a teacher you can become an administrator in our open group for free. You decide how the profile looks, what is says, the mission and the rewards. You can ask as many people to administrate the group with you as you want too. Join the group to kick-start this open mission project.

 

Are you bringing home the bacon?

Challenge your pupils to think of a solution to a food-related problem and they can win £100 to make it happen

On the Mission:Explore website there are a wide range of rewards that your pupils can win. One of the most interesting has been posted by GeoVation, Ordnance Survey’s innovation programme. They are challenging children aged between 7 and 16 to:

• Picture a food problem

• Think of a solution

• Create a plan to make it happen

It’s free to enter and the best pupils or teams can be awarded £100 to make their ideas happen.

I think this is an awesome opportunity that challenges pupils to be creative and innovative in a local and geographical context.

Learn more here.