In the early spring of 2010, we began taking part in an online geography class called Journey North Mystery Class; a global game of hide-and-seek whereby students track seasonal changes in sunlight and then investigate other clues to find ten secret sites around the world.
Though we started each year with enthusiasm, we always failed to see the project through to completion. We would get pulled away on other projects or family holidays and thereby neglect to finish and report our findings. Even worse, we always dropped off before the exciting visual clues were even revealed. (Read about our failed efforts here, here, and here.)
Encouraged my her pen pal in Canada, my daughter asked to try again this year. We thereby vowed to see it through – but opted not to blog about it and risk falling short once again. 
Our promise to one another paid off. This year, we actually finished – reporting our findings on April 15th, well in advance of the deadline. We then anxiously awaited the results on the big reveal day.
We were pleased to discover that we had correctly identified 8 of the 10 mystery class sites. Not bad for essentially our first time.
Our Submissions:
#1 Guangzhou, China
#2 Albury, New South Wales, Australia
#3 Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo
#4 Liege, Belgium
#5 Cebu City, Philippines
#6 Vostok Station, Antarctica
#7 Brooklyn New York, United States
#8 Sao Paulo, Brazil
#9 Dunedin, Otago, New Zealand
#10 Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia
What We Learned:
Record and analyze local sunrise and sunset times
Calculate, graph, and analyze changing photoperiods
Record, graph, and analyze sunrise/sunset times from locations around the globe
Use Universal Time to estimate longitude of locations
Interpret and compare data to make predictions
Utilize technology and reference materials to research and decipher continent-country-city clues to pinpoint locations
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If you would like to learn more about Journey North Mystery Class, visit their website. Join us in 2015, when we undertake a quest to find a new set of ten mystery sites.