Finally! Found a good forum with the answers. I do not have a detector yet and am getting ready to pounce. Seems like it may be a F2 to start, but maybe an F4. I am a teacher at Marin Country Day School and run a lab called the Makers' Lab. Just got wired into facebook here: www.facebook.com/makerslab . Think a DIY, building, engineering, designing, tinkering mecca for kids...wood, metal, electronics, etc. I love it too! I get to buy tools and be a geek.

Toward the end of the school year at our K-8 school we run a special set of projects for the 8th graders. Each 8th grader can choose from a series of electives. I had 12 sign-up to be with me in a project called Land-Sea-Air. The projects I run are all about designing, prototyping, building and often times failing. I love to throw puzzles and races at the kids. In the Sea portion they must build a boat and sail to find buried treasure via an elaborate story with a treasure map, sight lines, gold lines, and X marking the spot. You can see where this is going can't you? If not, stay with me. So there we are, 12 8th graders, me and another support teacher on a beach in Marin County, CA. 4 boats racing to get map fragments to find buried treasure using compasses etc. etc. I buried the darn thing in the beach. A little chest with some Sees candy chocolate gold coins. Not deep, maybe 6 inches or so.

Well, they could not find it. They left to go back still having had lots of fun, but no buried treasure. I stayed and dug...and dug...and dug...and dug. It was foggy in the morning and I did not have my normal land marks (this is the second year I have done this). No joy. The students had dug up the entire beach and made a real mess of it. It took me an hour at least to put everything back. Thank goodness I kept them to sand. Still, no joy. No chest. I'm going back! This is a great opportunity for me to get a detector. So, I start my research like whenever I am about to buy a tool and land here in this wonderful forum. I may not find the chest with the detector...foil around coins (lots and lots of them) may not do it, but I will end up with a detector...and I think I have the bug with no detector yet!

So if you have some words of wisdom for a detector for a teaching specialist that teachers science and engineering...to other science teachers...please let me have it! I am currently looking at an F2 or F4, Garret Pro Pointer, and a cool digging tool or two. I also plan on taking a long 1/4 steel rod to poke down into the sand to see if that helps me find the chocolate!

Best,
Crush