The National Park Service is reaching out to kids with an innovative Web site that gets them excited about visiting our nation's parklands before they've even left home.

WebRangers, a program managed by the NPS Division of Interpretation and Education at http://www.nps.gov/webrangers/ is the recently added online companion to the Park Service's successful "Junior Ranger" program.

Every year, over 450,000 children take part in Junior Ranger activities at one of the 290 national parks, where they can explore nature, learn about U.S. history, and take part in each park's special activities designed to really get their hands dirty.

WebRangers enables children across the country and around the globe to explore the parks from the comfort of their couch---with the hope that they will be inspired to slip on a pair of hiking boots and go visit one.

"The overall goal of the Web site is to reach out to children on the Web and tell them to get up and get out to a national park," said Tom Davies, the coordinator of the program. "Many kids and grown-ups don't suspect that they own these places. We want them to explore the parks and also have fun in them."

A recent survey asked WebRangers what they had learned from using the site and turned up a few unexpected results. "The kids responded, ‘I learned that there is a National Park Service,'" Davies said. "It was kind of a forehead slapper for me. But it's kind of neat that WebRangers can reach out and let them know that we're here."

When children log on to the WebRangers site, they create an account, build their own ranger station, and play one of the 45 activities that range from decoding Washington's secret messages to unscrambling park safety rules. "This is kind of informal fun and an instructional way to visit a park," Davies says. "Kids want to go some place real and what it's doing is giving them that place and also letting learn more about the national parks."

And kids are visiting the site, which is funded in part by the National Park Foundation and the Best Buy Children's Foundation, who donated $750,000 to the program. There are currently 46,000 registered WebRangers. This past May, the site averaged approximately 68,000 page views a day, with visitors from 87 countries - everywhere from Brazil, to Mozambique, to Thailand.

Davies says that the site has really enabled kids to share their experiences in the parks with other children around the world. In April 2007, the site introduced My Community, which allows kids to post pictures and stories from their visits in a "web-safe" environment.

"My Grandma and I visited the Sugarlands Visitor Center and had a lot of fun on the trail behind the center," WebRanger j.n. writes. "We found an old hollow tree that we crouched down behind and pretended that we were hiding from the captain that was chasing Peter Pan, the lost boys and us."

Davies says it's these stories that encourage other children to visit the parks. "This peer to peer sharing is the most exciting thing. Rather than having adults professing about the national parks, we have kids saying ‘I went to Yellowstone Park, and I got to see this.'"

At a Visioning workshop hosted by the WebRangers team last September, representatives from the technology industry, educators, and NPS staff agreed that the interactive community will be a crucial component in the future of the Web site.

"We've put together a visioning goal to create more collaborative activities and more of a community," Davies says. "We hope to blur the lines between the real and virtual world by doing things like recording in-park activities on-line. I think that the growth of the collaborative stuff is going to be huge. Web Rangers really wants to tap into that." Davies adds that they will continue to listen to what the kids want as they look toward the future of WebRangers. The site works with the University of Maryland Human-Computer Interaction Lab that gives a team of children the opportunity to help evaluate the programs on the Web site. "The kids give us honest feedback about what works and what doesn't work," he says. "They're an integral part of our team."

Although the WebRangers program is targeted toward children, other people have also been logging on a checking out the site. "We have fallen in love with WebRangers and plan on using this as weekly assignments of homework that the children will do with their parents," writes a teacher from California. "It is just a superb website."

"I just went through your WebRangers program. I am a 50+ year old kid, but I loved it," adds another visitor. "This is the single best expenditure of tax dollars I have ever seen."