And how about if it not you  but your dog that goes to the school, or a bee that goes in a “bee line”, or a crow that goes “as the crow flies”?

Well, then, let's simplify matters and consider the distance of which, from one point to another, there is only one: the shortest distance. Everyone knows what that is: a straight line.

Could you, if you wanted, go from your home to the school in a straight line? Not a geometrical straight line, of course, which only exists in mathematical abstraction, but, say, a path one meter wide centered on a geometrical straight line.                              

What would be required to make that possible?

But that is not the challenge, only the warm-up to it. For the challenge, pick any two points on earth at least 200 kilometers apart, for example the point (31º45'N, 106º30'W, elevation 1147 m) in my home town, El Paso, Texas, and the point (18º56'N, 72º51'E, elevation 0) in Mumbai [formerly Bombay], India, where we have had a cyberpal or two.

Question number 1 (answerable by third-graders): what would you need (excluding humans, computers, and data banks) and how could you determine approximately (with an allowable margin of error of ±10% ) the shortest distance between the two points?

Question number 2 (also answerable by third-graders, once they have what the answer to question 1 calls for): determine that distance (to ±10% ).

Question number 3 (answerable, at least in part, by third graders): What, if anything, would be required to make that straight line travel possible?

Question number 4 (requires more math than is covered in third grade; non-programmable calculator allowed, but not computer): What would be the “exact” (within ±0.01%) distance between two points with the same coordinates as the above, situated on a perfect sphere of radius 6367 km (the radius of a sphere close in size to the Earth, which is not a perfect sphere)?

Question number 5 (which I don't know how to answer): what is the actual (to ±0.0001%) distance between the two real points?

Question number 6: when you get back to your home at 4 P.M. is it in the same place as when you left it at 7 A.M.?

Question number 7: what exactly do you mean by “the same place”?