UW Bothell students, Kenmore and local geocacher publish Adventure Lab trail to highlight waterfront park

University of Washington Bothell students, City of Kenmore staff and longtime Kenmore resident Jeff Weaver published a new Adventure Lab geocaching trail meant to guide visitors through the history and environmental restoration of a Kenmore waterfront park.

The Adventure Lab was created as the group project for the first-year class “Art and Politics of Walking,” taught by UW Bothell professor Jason Lombacher. The project used the Adventure Lab mobile app (a geocaching.com product) to place multiple virtual waypoints at the park, each with a question or prompt unlocked when a user approaches the mapped location.

Students researched the park’s past uses, native plants and tribes associated with the site and the city’s capital improvements, and then distilled that material into short, location-based prompts. Dana Washington, UW Bothell’s community-engaged learning program manager, said the project was intended as an experiential learning opportunity “to get students to know a place” and to practice collaboration, research and user-experience decisions.

Jeff Weaver, a longtime Kenmore resident and geocaching expert who advised the class on placement and platform rules, said he helped ensure the Adventure Lab complied with guidelines for Adventure Labs and geocaching (for example, spacing between waypoints and restrictions near certain facilities). “I use multimillion dollar satellites to find Tupperware hidden in the woods,” Weaver said, describing the basics of geocaching and the appeal of site-based discovery.

Professor Lombacher said the class emphasized both civic and environmental history: students included information about the park’s indigenous history, its later uses and the environmental restoration work that created the current waterfront access. Lombacher also discussed the role of local bond funding in park improvements, noting that students researched bond measures as part of their work.

City of Kenmore staff member Lauren (last name not specified in the recording) and UW Bothell staff including Chase (community-engaged research program manager) assisted with logistics and connections. Washington said the city and university coordinated along public transit corridors to identify parks within easy reach of students.

The Adventure Lab is available through the Adventure Lab app and is linked from geocaching.com. Washington said the city-sponsored Adventure Lab appears as a purple listing in the app; at the time of the recording the students’ Lab had received public completions and comments, which Washington said numbered about 17 individual completions on the app.

Students were not responsible for all promotion; UW Bothell and local partners posted a story and the university’s community-engaged learning channels highlighted the project. Weaver said he completed a test run of the published Lab and posted a photo; the project team encouraged residents and visitors to download the Adventure Lab app and try the trail to learn more about the site’s history and wildlife.

The collaborators said they hope the Adventure Lab model can be replicated in other classes and parks to deepen student engagement and introduce more people to Kenmore’s public spaces. The UW Bothell class component is part of the university’s Discovery Core and is designed to blend in-class study with on-the-ground practicum work.