These suggestions fell out of our work with urban police who are responsible for search for missing children. However, I believe the pedagogical rationale is that the exercises link the child's real-world activities with cultural conventions that must be learned. This question is used to estimate the crow's flight distance of possible travel from point last seen. The distance serves as a radius of a circle to contain initial search operations. Crow's flight distance from home is also a measure used in environmental psychology to index home range.
Home range is the territory that includes the child's self-initiated travel.
It is curious in both cases that an area should be represented by a linear estimate, and one suggestion was that police could ask parents about all of the known destinations of their children. This would yield a skeletal route map and by connecting the endpoints of various routes, a polygon that includes areas where the child may have attempted connections between routes. A search manager suggested that a periodic exercise for parents and children would be to sit down with colored pencils and draw a sketch map of the child's travels. Parents would have more realistic knowledge of their child's adventures and police could ask for recently produced maps. The sophistication of the mapping skills in the curricula can parallel the expansion of home range through the primary school grades.