At a recent conference, some teachers asked how they could address some math concepts using ArcExplorer Java Edition for Education (AEJEE), ESRI's free, downloadable, dual platform (WinXP/MacOSX), lightweight GIS tool. This was a fun challenge!

The opening project of the AEJEE Tutorial (10grid_hd.axl) and a companion project (10gridpn_hd.axl) provide two handy 10x10 grids for mathematical playgrounds. The two projects use "Cartesian space", with the first strictly in "positive space" and the second covering both positive and negative portions of the X and Y axes. Creative explorers will find interesting options just playing with coordinate systems. If the 10x10 space actually represented a 100x100 unit space on the school playground, could you map the distribution of ant colonies (etc) just with a simple X,Y table?

Of course, any analysis that gets into selection and queries opens the floodgates for math work. For instance, the opening lesson of the Tutorial asks the user to do a complex query, which is good old-fashioned set theory. Coming up with an answer to any query, the user can scroll through the results table to see what appears, click the "Statistics" button below, and generate stats about a particular field using either the whole universe or just the query results, finding count, max, min, mean, standard deviation, and total.

An earlier blog entry dealt complex math queries to identify ratios, while another explored population change by doing "math-embedded queries" to find those counties in the US which had a 5-year population decrease exceeding 1% per year. And one of the earliest blog entries covered the use of buffers to determine changing impact from alternative selections. And who could resist exploring some of the simple calculations that are possible in an exercise dealing with baseball parks -- Just how far is it if a batter smacks one "out of the park"?

These are just some of the innumerable possibilities for seeing how AEJEE is a great tool for demonstrating a variety of math concepts in everyday life experience!

- Charlie Fitzpatrick, ESRI Education Manager