MINNEAPOLIS, March 26: When Dan Buettner pedalled through Central America, he strapped a satellite dish to his bike, connected to schools via the Internet and persuaded children to join him in the jungle.Four years later, the world's premier bicycle adventurer has led millions of students through rain forests strewn with snakes, shown them Mayan tombs and shared dozens of meals with them.And the children still get to go out for recess.Buettner's revolutionary experiment in Internet education, called Mayaquest, allows students from all over the world to become cyber explorers in a land few would see otherwise.More than 56,000 classrooms on five continents are using the Internet to follow the final Mayaquest expedition, which ends on April 3.For their part, the students have helped Buettner and his team of scientists understand why the Mayan civilisation collapsed in the ninth century.The six-person team bikes to Central American archaeological sites chosen by students, such as Palenque inMexico and Tikal in Guatemala. They act like detectives at a thousand-year-old crash scene, scooping the area for clues, snapping photographs, questioning people who live or work nearby.The team then posts its findings, video clips, observations from archaeologists, profiles of local Mayans and even Mayan recipes on their world wide web site (Classroom.Com). The site had seven million visits in three months during last year's expedition.Mary Ferguson, social studies coordinator for elementary students at the International School of Brussels, Belgium, said she heard about Mayaquest at a social studies conference in Sydney, Australia, and decided to try it with her class of 11- to 12-year-olds.``It's great fun and it's really useful. They really like the interactive part, it's really motivating,'' she says.No one knows exactly why the Mayans abandoned their highly advanced cities in what is now Guatemala, Mexico, Belize, El Salvador and Honduras. But Buettner believes students can help figure itout.``The greatest discoveries have come about by looking at old quandaries through fresh eyes,'' Buettner said.
