My family has been geocaching off and on for over five years, more on in the last two.
My 11 year old started earning the Hi Tech Hide & Seek IP award last summer. She stretched herself to learn more, rather than relying on skills she already had. She started another travel bug when she placed her own cache. She is continuing to maintain it and will for the foreseeable future. The last activity element she had was to Share. An opportunity presented itself with our service unit hiking club. My daughter picked to place some "trainer" caches on the trail we would be walking, rather than having people try and find existing caches. We talked about type of hide and locations on our first trail walk. Next time she placed the containers and took readings. She then put together a booklet describing the sport, some basics for finding, how to use the gps, ..., and the coordinates for her placed caches.
There were adults with all the kids at the hike so the families shared one or two units (checked out from the local Girl Scout service center). After the general information and directions were given, we divided the large group into three smaller groups (~10). Each group had a plan on what order to look for the caches. In each group we sent an experienced geocacher; myself, my 11 year old, and my 8 year old. The "expert" guided the group and answered lots of questions. The adults were encouraged to look, but not "grab" the find. We made special trade items for the event and each kid could claim one from the cache.
The key elements were: hiding caches to demonstrate the skills you want to empart, hiding them far enough apart that another group doesn't see you finding, preparing the "hunters" ahead of time with knowledge, splitting into smaller groups (~5 girls), making sure a person with each group really knows what they are doing.
My 8 year old has by far earned the Junior Geocaching badge and more.
