Author Archives: Barb

Fedstats’ Mapstats for Kids is a collection of interactive games created to teach concepts about maps and statistics. It is based on the national standards for geography, math, and statistics. The characters are called Globie (maps) and Stixie (statistics).

One of the great educational booths at the esri conference was Chugach Children’s Forest in Alaska. I finally got a chance to check out their interactive website. Chugach Children’s Forest is a “symbolic designation for the entire Chugach National Forest: and “a ground-breaking new program that creates exciting opportunities for Alaska’s youth and communities to connect with Alaska’s magnificent public lands”. What I enjoyed the most and thought would make a great resource for teacher’s are the student films created by the Chugach Conservation Corps and other youth groups. National Geographic’s My Wonderful World blog has entries by student posts over three days field experience on their blog. My Wonderful World is a National Geographic campaign to expand geographic learning in school, at home, and in communities.

One of the most enjoyable things about attending the ESRI UC is interacting with all of the middle school, high school, and youth groups. Their enthusiasm is infectious — and that is just the teachers, parents, and mentors. The students are modest about their achievements which are usually civic volunteerism projects that benefit their community. The teachers, parents, and mentors are modest about the personal time and money that they invested in the project. They are all modest about the team effort, trust, and overcoming obstacles that volunteer projects entail beyond the geospatial component.

At the 2010 ESRI User Conference session on building content based learning environments on “teaching the teachers”, the speakers (Susan Flentie, Lewistown Junior High School; Jeff Dunn, University of Connecticut Libraries Map and Geographic Information (MAGIC) center, and Stewart Bruce, Washington College), brought up some of the core issues for integrating geospatial skills. The first is that often when teachers say “this would be too difficult for my students” what they mean is “this is difficult for me and I don’t want to look weak in front of my students”. For those who aren’t teachers, it is difficult to understand how much courage it takes for a teacher to let go of some of their authority in a class. Over the years of attending the ED UC and other educational conferences, the teachers who have overcome this problem often do so by taking the risk of learning alongside their students but the reward is that it encourages students to participate and feel mastery over a subject area.
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Oregon Scientific makes some really cool spatial gadgets including remote sensors, rain gauges, and what they call sports,fitness,and play. The one I thought was one of those, “why didn’t someone think of that before” gadgets is the Walk Around The World Pedometer that lets you walk your goal city and set your “route” with rewards for reaching your goal. Of course, it can’t simulate the many steps of Romania or Mucchu Picchu, if you live on the plains, but its a fun way to make your “staycation” more fun.

Discovery News and Treehugger are reporting on the new citizen scientist MOGO iphone app which lets the users can “take photos of oiled or dead wildlife, tar balls and oil slicks and upload them into the database which pinpoints their location for rescue workers”. Science for Citizens.net is a blog that can matches up potential citizen scientists with organization projects. Science has a June 2010 article on how scientists can find and collaborate with citizen scientists such as using locating and managing volunteers. One of the most well documented citizen science projects is the Galaxy Zoo project which asks volunteers to classify galaxy images from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope archive.

When is geography art, when an artist chooses to scatter them throughout cities such as Sao Paulo, Brazil; Sydney, Australia; London, England; and Barcelona, Spain.According to CNN, artist Luke Jerram and charitable organization Sing for Hope placed 60 newly refurbished pianos in public spaces throughout the city’s five boroughs.

GIS experts make really cool fans, especially when locations are involved. Unlike other types of fans who are limited to writing fanfic or posting comments about their favorite show, GIS experts can literally guide you through a universe. Apartment Therapy posted about Jonah M. Adkins, GISP Newport News, Virginia spent four (4)! years creating a geographic study of the fictious “ISLAND” from the TV show “LOST”. Of course there is always the Complete and Official Map of the Verse or Firefly Universe and a white paper on the discovery, colonization and structure of The Verse. Also, the Simpsons Interactive Map, an ambitious Big Bang Theory map which tries to locate fictional places in real life. According to TV Tropes, “Really deluxe worlds [fantasy world maps]are proportioned like two pages side by side” so that must make a geospatial map super deluxe or super obsessive.

GIS has more than one meaning for the Golf Industry Show and education conferences that is going to occur in February 2011. The use of geospatial technologies in the golf industry has exploded in recent years with companies like GolfLogix, Inc. who created the first handheld GPS device for the golf industry, out of where else, Scottsdale, Arizona.. Other geospatial golf technologies include phone apps such as the Golfshot for the iPhone and iPad which keeps track of scoring, aerial images of golf courses, GPS, and statistics. There are an amazing number of golf gps sites and review sites going by a variations of igolf and CompareGolfGPS variants.

The Dave Rumsey site has a cool Web based 3D GIS viewer with historic maps like the Lewis and Clark Expedition and an 1880′s map of Los Angeles basin. The maps can also be viewed on Google Earth viewer. They provide a video of the 3D process. E-perimetron has an article on “3D digitization of historical maps”. E-perimetron is the the international quarterly e-journal on sciences and technologies affined to history of cartography and maps.