Well, I guess the point of this exercise isn't so much to actually "find" the lost child, but rather to simulate a realistic SAR scenario. I could make up a location for the child (e.g. he's 1.7 miles northeast of the campsite) but what would that prove? S&R is statistical in nature, so there isn't really a "right" answer, only some that are better than others. If they come up with a realistic plan that happens to miss the "book" solution, is that really a valuable learning experience?

Right now, this is a way to teach the basic theory without "teaching" or making it an extension of their normal school day. My intent is to give more complex scenarios and introduce some more tools. Perhaps we'll make it an extension of the current scenario: e.g. "After searching three of the four grids around the camp, searchers found a child's footprints in a patch of mud 1.7 miles NE of the PLS; he appeared to be heading east or southeast at the time." Bear in mind, I have no S&R training, so I'm pretty much reading the books and making the training plan up as I go along.

Probably in the spring or early summer, we'll go out to a camping lodge that we use for our Wilderness Survival training and perform a real S&R exercise "in the wild". (There's a fairly large wooded area, about a mile by a mile and a half, bounded by a fence on three sides and a clearly defined cut-line on the fourth, so there's almost no chance of it turning into a real S&R :-)