Classes, Events and Outings

Navigation Games main focus is development of orienteering-based curricula for schools. We also provide services locally within the greater Boston area.

Summer Program for teens

Navigation Games partners with the Cambridge Mayor's Summer Youth Employment Program to give high schoolers an active and educational summer outlet for orienteering and workplace development. The program aims to teach youth life skills through learning about navigation with maps, teaching others, and working with a non-profit. Teens attend for 4 hours each weekday from early July through mid August. They receive coaching in the sport of orienteering, teach younger children at summer camps, learn workplace skills, participate in career development activities, learn about non-profit organizations, and take on projects to advance our non-profit mission.  The City of Cambridge provides additional services for MSYEP teens in the program, such as career and college counseling. 

The teens will help our adult staff deliver programs throughout summer camps in the area.  This past summer we were partnered with four summer camps where we taught orienteering to kids from ages four to fifteen.  In addition to the teaching, each of our teen staff was assigned a project to help grow our non-profit and teach them essential workplace habits.  The teens were split into four different teams in the following areas: Marketing, Fundraising, Teaching and Videography.  Each group worked on a variety of different projects throughout the summer, including developing a social media strategy (Marketing), designing a scavenger hunt for young adults (Fundraising), developing lesson plans and creating new orienteering games (Teaching) and documenting teaching and editing educational videos to accompany our 3rd grade curriculum (Videography).

Many Cambridge students have been introduced to orienteering in school, at Girls in Sports Day, and through after-school classes via the Community Schools. Our summer camp program provides a much more intensive orienteering experience. Through their participation, Cambridge youth develop their spatial awareness and sense of place. We learn to identify multiple possible solutions to problems, practice critical reasoning skills, and adapt to new situations. We also learn how to apply math, estimate ditance, and find direction using navigational tools. All of these skills advance their orienteering abilities, and their ability to navigate challenges in their broader lives.

Navigation Games is also adopting a learning-through-games approach. Children—and adults—learn better when they're having fun. As such, we have designed our lessons, activities, and programs to practice and develop orienteering and life skills through the implementation of fun activities. Over the summer, our youth employees will be able to participate in these activities, as well as deliver them as programs to summer camps and youth groups in the area. They may also host some public forest events for anyone in the community who's looking for a fun-filled afternoon in the forest.

We have a fantastic staff to deliver these programs. More about our 2019 staff: Ethan Childs, the lead supervisor, is a former member of the junior and senior US orienteering teams. He coached the CRLS orienteering team to victory at Junior Nationals in 2018, and teaches after-school classes in Cambridge Community Schools. This is his third year with us. Maiken Sandberg, from Norway, has helped put on several world-class orienteering events, and volunteered as an MSYEP supervisor for Navigation Games in 2017. Evalin Brautigam is a former member of the US junior orienteering team; both she and Ethan have competed for Team USA at orienteering world championships in several different countries. She is a graduate of Eastern Connecticut State College.

Classes

Outside of our in-school programs, we often teach classes at the Cambridge Community Schools. Contact us if you'd like to propose a new venue for a class. These classes are geared towards children in grades JK-5, with a focus on developing spatial memory and map-reading ability through fun games and activities. We run around outdoors as much as possible, and have interactive activities inside when the weather doesn't cooperate. We also hone our observational skills and develop as environmental scientists. Activities include animal-orienteering, pine cone scavenger hunts, grid-O, map relays, compass building, and much more! 

Public Events

We partner with the New England Orienteering Club and Cambridge Sports Union to bring orienteering games and races to the general public. Contact us if you'd like to sponsor a public event.

For orienteering events open to the public, see the calendar at the NEOC website. The New England Orienteering Club (NEOC) holds events open to the public throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island.  In addition, the orienteering section of Cambridge Sports Union offers public orienteering events in the parks and forests of the greater Boston area. 

Birthday Parties

Navigation Games activities are perfect for birthday parties and fun gatherings for children of all ages. With everything from easy scavenger hunts to technical and challenging races, children and their friends are guaranteed to have a great time!

Some of our most popular activities include Animal-O, Object Hide-and-Seek, and Bing-O, and we have many other activities and fun twist for each game to ensure the perfect level of fun for your group. We can even provide activities for older crowds as well. Just let us know who to expect, and Navigation Games will deliver a fun-filled day for everyone!

Corporate Events

Orienteering is unique among sports in the amount of mental focus required to be successful. Fortunately, this makes orienteering an excellent activity when encouraging groups to work together in order to solve complicated scenarios. Often times, no one individual possesses all the knowledge necessary for a project or task to be successful. Even if they do, we still depend on others to help us accomplish our more ambitious goals.

At Navigation Games, we design our activities so that teams who take the time to think and work together will experience the most success. Many of the challenges we incorporate revolve around assessing the knowledge of different team members, emphasizing good communication, and dividing up responsibility in order to achieve efficiency. We are also able to adjust our activities to suit particular needs or goals of your group, such as learning how to actively listen, practice patience and/or quick decision-making, or even communicating effectively over the phone! 

Pricing for our corporate programs is dependent on the number of participants, duration of the activity, and type of activity delivered. For details about pricing and availability, be sure to contact us at least two months before the desired date of your program.

Feel free to browse our games and activities; we take special requests. Typically participants will team up to solve challenges involving map and compass in the woods. There will be refreshments.