Field Trip

A field trip or excursion, known as school trip in the UK and New Zealand and school tour in Ireland, is a journey by a group of people to a place away from their normal environment. The purpose of the trip is usually observation for education, non-experimental research or to provide students with experiences outside their everyday activities, such as going camping with teachers and their classmates. The aim of this research is to observe the subject in its natural state and possibly collect samples. In western culture people first come across this method during school years when classes are taken on school trips to visit a geological or geographical feature of the landscape, for example. Much of the early research into the natural sciences was of this form. Charles Darwin is an important example of someone who has contributed to science through the use of field trips. It is generally for students in grades K-12 and college. Field trips are generally domestic, but for high school students, it becomes international.

To mitigate these risks and expenses, most school systems now have formalized field trip procedures that considers the entire trip from estimation, approval and scheduling through planning the actual trip and post-trip activities.