About This Series
This series is planned to be ten caches. The first nine will
provide lessons to assist you in building your puzzle-solving
skills. Each will contain a lesson centering on a specific puzzle
skill, examples of how to apply that skill, an exercise to test you
on that skill, and a cache to find as a reward for your efforts.
Study the lesson, complete the exercise, and you'll find the
location of a cache..
Each of the caches will contain a piece of information you will
need to help you take the final exam (which will be the tenth and
final cache in the series). When you visit each cache, you will
need to bring something to record those clues for later ...like
paper and pen/pencil or perhaps a camera.
One final note: Each of these caches will have an unactivated
geocoin in it as a First to Find prize. Crew416's rule: IF YOU
HAVE BEEN FIRST TO FIND ON ANY CACHE IN THIS SERIES, YOU MAY NOT -
NOT - NOT FIND OR LOG ANOTHER ONE IN THE SERIES FIRST UNTIL IT HAS
ALREADY BEEN FOUND AND LOGGED BY SOMEONE ELSE!!! That means
there should be 9 different First to Find cachers on the first 9
caches in this series. The final exam will be open to all,
including the 9 first to finders on the first nine caches, and will
also contain a nice geocoin prize for the first finder. This will
give a few new puzzle cachers the opportunity to be First to Find
on a puzzle cache, perhaps for the first time ever. This should
give more cachers the thrill of solving and being there first and
score a new geocoin prize... and one experienced puzzle solver
doesn't end up with all the coins. So shall we continue to our next
lesson?
Lesson 3: Trivia
Introduction
Lesson 1 of this series of caches gives you a generalized
approach to solving puzzle caches. Lesson 2 supplies you with some
basic tools that can be used to take apart a puzzle and make it
solvable. With this lesson, we begin to look at some specific types
of puzzles and discuss strategies applicable to each.
This lesson deals with solving a type of cache that is commonly
called a “trivia challenge”. A trivia challenge is a cache whose
solution depends upon being able to correctly answer a number of
trivia questions about a particular subject.
Trivia Challenges
Trivia challenges used to be difficult. Unless you were a
subject matter expert on the topic at hand, you used to have to get
up out of your chair, hop on your bike, head to your local library,
and hunt through encyclopedias and magazines and newspapers and
microfiche slides and vinyl records and videotapes and audio
cassettes and arcane dusty tomes you found in the card catalog.
(Remember when the card catalog was made up of actual physical
cards? You do remember car catalogs don’t you? Did I just age
myself?)
Today, due to the wide availability of high-speed internet
connections, fast search engines, and massive free online
repositories of all world knowledge, you can launch an effective
attack on a trivia challenge without leaving the comfort of your
own home computer (of course you wouldn’t use your work computer to
do geocaching stuff). To solve a trivia challenge, you need to know
ways in which information is organized and presented on the
internet.
Search Engines
If you’re reading this online, then you probably already know
what a search engine is. Search engines are probably the single
most useful tool in existence for tracking down trivia.
A search engine is a tool that allows you to look for key words
or phrases in a database of web pages. There is no particular
ordering to any of the web pages in the database – the search
engine treats them as though they were one giant mass of
information.
Every search engine has its own copy of the data on the internet
and its own method of determining what pages match your query.
Sometimes Google alone isn’t
enough – you may need to use
Yahoo ,
MSN,
AOL , or
Ask.com to find what you’re
after.
Just knowing the URL of a search engine or portal isn’t always
enough – you have to know how to use that tool to effectively find
what you’re after. You can’t just enter every word; you have to
enter the right combination of words.
For instance, suppose your trivia challenge topic is the band
Pink Floyd and the question relates to the song “Breathe”. If you
enter “breathe” into Google, the first page of responses won’t have
any links that relate to Pink Floyd. But “breathe pink floyd”
returns only relevant matches.
One of the most powerful features of a search engine is the
ability to search for things other than just keywords. Google can
search for images, maps, news articles … even sets of data.
Specialized Databases
There are a great many specialized databases out there that
contain all sorts of excellent fodder for trivia challenges. Most
of the time, entering the name of your topic (such as “curling” or
“calculus” or “ice cream”) plus the word “trivia” into a search
engine will give you an excellent list of starting points for
finding your answers. Here are a few other databases that often
come in handy.
Internet Movie
Database
Has every fact about every movie, television show, and video
game
Places
Named
Find any named place in the United States by name or partial
name
Perry-Castañeda
Library Map Collection
Tons of maps from around the world and throughout time
CIA World Fact Book
Geographic, political, and economic information about countries
around the world
Wikis
A wiki is a collaborative informative web site that anyone with
access can update. Content in a wiki is organized into pages with
links to other topics in the wiki. These links allow you to find a
topic, then find related topics, then find topics related to those
topics, etc.
The best-known wiki is
Wikipedia, which acts as a
very large general purpose encyclopedia of human knowledge. Many
other wikis exist that are tailored to specific areas of
interest.
A wiki's greatest strength is also its biggest weakness - the
accuracy of a wiki's contents is only as good as its contributors.
It is very easy to find wrong, outdated, or incomplete information
on a wiki, so use them with caution.
Forums
A forum is an online bulletin board system (remember the days of
pulse-dialing into a BBS at 300 bps on your C-64?). A bulletin
board system allows its users to post messages and carry on
conversations on a variety of topics. Forums typically support a
community of individuals unified by some common interest (such as
geocaching or puzzles).
The beauty of a forum is that it is not only specific to a topic
and searchable for content, but that it is also interactive. Forums
are great places to ask for help if you’re stuck on a puzzle or
missing a critical piece of information. The local
Dry Creek Geocachers
forum is a great place where local cachers could discuss local
puzzles. There have been so few puzzle cachers in our area that it
has never really been used for that purpose, but wouldn’t it be
great if it was? There are several other forums in California,
north of us, where puzzle caching and solving is a regular topic of
discussion on their forums. If you can't find an appropriate forum
that's specific to the topic, check with the
Groundspeak
Forums.
One note about forum etiquette: while it is okay to ask for help
in solving a puzzle, it is generally frowned upon to discuss the
solution to a puzzle in public. It's usually best to ask the cache
owner for a hint or a pointer in the right direction before posting
a public request for help. After a puzzle writer spends a
considerable amount of time preparing and posting a puzzle, the
last thing he/she wants to see is the solution posted for everyone
to read on a forum. But, that does not mean that hints and help is
not welcome. Best just to ask.
Cranking Up the Difficulty
Puzzle writers know about all of these information sources and
how easy it is for solvers to access them. Here are some ways that
puzzle writers make the trivia challenge more difficult in this day
of fast and easy information access.
Make it hard to find the answer. A question may reference a bit
of information that exists on only one web site. Or for which there
are multiple conflicting sources. Or doesn’t exist online at all.
Or requires you to find a picture, sound file or movie clip –
something that can’t be Googled.
For example, what’s the answer to this question: In
Yorkshire, England, the record was set for longest distance flown
by a paper airplane in what category?
Make it complicated to answer the question. This is easiest to
achieve in a true/false statement with multiple components. In
order for the statement to be true, every single component of the
statement must be true; otherwise, the statement is false.
For example: True or false? The Barefoot Mailman’s six-day
136-mile round trip route between Palm Beach and Miami during the
period of 1885 to 1892 included overnight stops in the Orange Grove
House of Refuge in Delray Beach and the Fort Lauderdale House of
Refuge, both of which were operated by the U. S. Coast
Guard.
Exercise 3: Knowledge Is Power
How well do you know your Schoolhouse Rock trivia? You remember
Schoolhouse Rock - those music videos you loved on Saturday morning
cartoons, brought to life by the creative team of Tom Yohe and Bob
Dorough. This puzzle will test your knowledge of those 3-minute
video clips of pure musical genius that fooled you into learning
your times tables, grammar, science, American history, and
more.
Below are the titles of all 53 songs recorded for Schoolhouse
Rock, divided up into two tables (one with columns A, B, and C, the
other with columns D, E, and F).
Below the tables are a list of statements about the songs in
Schoolhouse Rock. Each of those statements is true about one or
more songs, and more than one statement may be true for the same
song. For each statement, determine the song or songs for which
that statement is true, then cross that song or songs off of the
list.
Column A |
Column B |
Column C |
(0) Three Ring Government |
(0) Ready or Not, Here I Come |
(0) Interplanet Janet |
(1) Figure Eight |
(1) The Four-Legged Zoo |
(1) Where the Money Goes |
(2) Elementary, My Dear |
(2) I'm Just a Bill |
(2) The Check's in the Mail |
(3) The Body Machine |
(3) Rufus Xavier Sarsaparilla |
(3) Elbow Room |
(4) Software |
(4) Naughty Number Nine |
(4) I Got Six |
(5) Dollars and Sense |
(5) A Victim of Gravity |
(5) Verb: That's What's
Hapenning |
(6) Tax Man Max |
(6) Introduction |
(6) Walkin' on Wall Street |
(7) Unpack Your Adjectives |
(7) The Preamble |
(7) Tyrannosaurus Debt |
(8) Presidential Minute |
(8) I'm Gonna Send Your Vote to
College |
(8) This for That |
Column D |
Column E |
Column F |
(0) The Tale of Mr. Morton |
(0) Electricity, Electricity |
(0) Do the Circulation |
(1) Mother Necessity |
(1) Hardware |
(1) Making $7.50 Once a
Week |
(2) Little Twelvetoes |
(2) Three Is a Magic Number |
(2) Lolly, Lolly, Lolly, Get Your
Adverbs Here |
(3) Fireworks |
(3) Lucky Seven Sampson |
(3) Sufferin' Till Suffrage |
(4) No More Kings |
(4) Them Not-So-Dry Bones |
(4) Number Cruncher |
(5) Busy Prepositions |
(5) The Weather Show |
(5) My Hero, Zero |
(6) Telegraph Line |
(6) Conjunction Junction |
(6) A Noun Is a Person, Place or
Thing |
(7) The Shot Heard 'Round the
World |
(7) The Great American Melting
Pot |
(7) Interjections! |
|
(8) The Energy Blues |
(8) The Good Eleven |
Statements
- All of these songs were part of the Computer Rock series
staring Scooter Computer and Mr. Chips.
- This song has the lyric "Your heart starts beating faster and
you blush!"
- This song and video was never aired during the initial
broadcast of the series. It was first available as part of the 30th
anniversary DVD.
- The lyrics of this song mention The Beatles, The Monkees, and
Chubby Checker.
- This song misquotes a document, omitting the words "of the
United States".
- This is the only song entirely in 6/8 time.
- This was the very first Schoolhouse Rock song written and
recorded.
- These songs were sung in whole or in part by Blossom
Dearie.
- Dave Frishberg wrote the music and lyrics for these songs.
- This song's lyrics describe "that prince over there, the one
with the fuzzy hair".
- The video of this song features a boy wearing a t-shirt that
reads "Camp Yohe".
- This song contains part of the melody for Handel's "Hallelujah
Chorus".
- The setting for this song is Noah's Ark.
- This song was peformed by The Tokens.
- Cover versions of these songs were released on the album
Schoolhouse Rock ROCKS!.
- The lyrics for this song describe "the great new craze that's
sweeping that nation".
- ABC was sued for airing the original version of this song.
- This song has the lyric "See you later, alligator!"
- These songs were sung in whole or in part by Jack Sheldon.
(what a cool name)
- In the video of this song, the main character has a circle
around one eye and a number on one foot.
- This song was performed by Hilary Duff.
- All of these songs were part of the Money Rock
series.
When you have finished with all of the statements, you will have
exactly one song title left in each column that has not been
crossed off. Plug the number next to that song into the following
template to find the final coordinates of this cache.
N 36 41.ABC W 119 33.DEF
First
to Find Honors Go To: Doctor A
This cache placed by a member of
Dry Creek Geocachers