My daughter recently went on her year 6 residential and really enjoyed the orienteering portion. This reminded me how much I had enjoyed orienteering as a child as well, so we decided to try some out over the summer holidays.

I thought I did a fair amount of research, I downloaded the mobo app, I printed out the map, and we brought a compass. I decided we would go to Queen Elizabeth Olympic park because they have 6 permanent courses, 2 of which are for beginners/easy.

It took us absolutely ages to find the starting point, so we were all already fairly tired and grumpy by this point. Then when I scanned the first point, all it did was check me in. We wrongly assumed that we’d then be given compass directions or something to find the next point, but really it seemed like we just had to find the points based on where they were shown on the map.

Was I missing something? How exactly are we meant to do it? As we did it, it seemed like an exercise in map-reading.