GIS Education Community Blog

This being the time for Independence Day in the USA, wouldn’t it be interesting to use GIS to investigate if place names having “Independence Day” origins have a spatial pattern? Ask your students what names come to mind when they think of Independence Day. I chose four—Liberty, Independence, Freedom, and America (I even have a niece named Liberty!).

I started ArcMap and added the world street base map from ArcGIS Online. I then loaded the most comprehensive American cities shapefile I could find, with 23,435 cities. I used Find tool to locate all cities with Liberty, Independence, Freedom, or America in any part of the name, saving them one at a time into individual layers. Liberty was the most popular with 29 place names, the largest of which was Liberty, Missouri. Independence came in second with 10 instances with Independence, Missouri, topping the list with 112,301 people. Was Missouri the site of most of these 4th-of-July names? The maps showed Missouri to have a few, but the names were scattered from the mid-Atlantic states to the Midwest, 4 Liberties in eastern Iowa, a few names in the deep south and far west; nothing in Alaska or Hawaii. Was this pattern what you expected?

This exercise shows how easy it is to perform tasks in ArcGIS. I used the Find tool, highlighted place names matching the criterion, and then used Select because it allowed me to find all instances of the place name, wherever the chosen place name appeared, in any field. Second, using Selection -> Create Layer from Selected Features provided a quick way of creating new layers without having to create layer files or exporting the selection to new shapefiles or feature classes. Third, one can easily use standard symbols in nonstandard ways; the ovals I chose came from the Businesses symbol set. Finally, this exercise shows the ease of using ArcGIS Online data as a base map.

What other place names could you use in similar ways to investigate patterns?

- Joseph Kerski, Education Manager, ESRI.

The ESRI EdCommunity is now hosting another cool tool for educators using GIS! This one is based on the power and speed of high-performing base maps from ArcGIS Online. On the Community Web Mapping Tools page, webmeister Tom Baker has built some nifty little tools to use for educational purposes. The Lat-Long Finder allows you to find the decimal degree coordinates of any place on Earth. The Sketch-A-Map allows you to draw on a map.

Sound boring? Imagine building a set of GPS coordinates for a virtual field trip, with just the Lat-Long Finder and a text editor or spreadsheet. Piece of cake! You can easily set up a whole banquet of precise coordinates across the community or around the world. Then, use the Sketch-A-Map to highlight the area of interest, and save the output to an image file.

Zoom in to see the block or zoom out to the continent. Sketch a quick "My Community" map and have kids compare community boundaries. (It works best as an educational activity if people draw it themselves on plain paper first, then draw it using the map. How accurate were they?) Since both tools allow users to float between different base maps, lots of interesting comparisons are available, with just a web browser, on Windows or Macintosh!

The two applications require the Flash player 10 or above, which can be downloaded automatically and installed for free (if you have install privileges). Enjoy!! (You will!!)

- Charlie Fitzpatrick, ESRI Co-Manager for Schools

ArcGIS Online now includes collection of tasks, including geocoding, and a routing service that supports point-to-point and optimized routing for North America and Europe. It is available as a standard, no-cost service with a limit of 5,000 routes per year and as a fee-based service for each additional block of 5,000 routes, which can be used for commercial purposes. The network analyst extension is not required.

To begin, start ArcMap 9.3.1, turn on the StreetMap toolbar, and select “Find Route using online route services” . Select the desired routing service for North America or Europe. The North America routing service, based on Tele Atlas 2008 data, enables the generation of routes and driving directions for the USA and Canada. Up to 25 route barriers may be included per request.

On the Find Route box, under the Stops tab, enter the stops along your proposed route. Up to 10 stops can be added from graphics or features. For the example above, I set up a lesson where students are the “new owners” of a double-decker, open-top Manhattan tour bus. They have to route the bus from St John the Divine Church, to Radio City, the New York Public Library, the Empire State Building, the House of Oldies in Greenwich Village, the Woolworth Building, the American Geographical Society on Wall Street, and return.

The 7 stops came from a comma-separated-value (.csv) file that I had geocoded using the ArcGIS Online geocoding service and saved as a shapefile. On the Options tab, add a graphic, add a callout, and save the route and the stops as shapefiles. Students compare the quickest (in yellow) and the shortest route (in blue) in terms of the map and the total distance traveled. Only the quickest route has the bus traveling through the Upper East Side of Manhattan. How does adding one stop, changing the order of stops, or adjusting the influence of local roads versus highways affect the final route?

Give the ArcGIS Online routing service a try in your classroom!

--Joseph Kerski, Education Manager, ESRI.

Have a look at this cool demo, presented by Jack Dangermond and Jeremy Bartley, at the recent Where 2.0 conference in San Jose.

The video resolution is rather poor, however you’ll get the idea.

http://en.oreilly.com/where2009/public/schedule/detail/9102

Pay special attention to the demo part, starting at about minute 9.

If you are not a programmer, some of Jeremy’s presentation might sound like gibberish: Silverlight, Flex, JSON, REST interfaces, etc. But show this video to a programmer, especially one in the 15-30 year-old range, and you’ll like get a “cool!” kind of response.

A lot of people out there (GIS world) are under the impression that map mash-ups are necessarily wedded to Google Maps. Wow, demos such as this one show clearly how similarly interesting mash-ups can and are being created using “real” GIS software platforms. What’s the difference? Mainly, that there’s a huge collection of analysis capabilities behind the GIS-based mash-ups. Not simply pretty web maps.

Those of you attending the upcoming User Conference will see more of this, live!

- Mike Gould, Director of Higher Education

MACHIAS, Maine — More than 20 students from middle and high schools throughout the state participated in the first Maine State Geographic Information Systems Championship Finals at the University of Maine at Machias on Saturday, June 13.

The students, who were regional champions from preliminary events held earlier in the spring, convened on the UMM campus to demonstrate their geographic information systems and global positioning system skills, while competing for more than $3,000 in scholarship awards.

Read more online.

Since 2008, ArcGIS Online maps have been helping educators and others with free, ready-made maps that can be used directly in ArcGIS Desktop. Did you know that tasks have recently joined these ArcGIS Online maps? For example, free online geocoding tools are available for your ArcGIS 9.2 and higher applications.

The geocoding and place finding capabilities are based on recent TeleAtlas data and support single address, reverse, and batch geocoding of up to 1,000 batch geocodes annually. For external commercial use of ArcGIS Online tasks or for more than 1,000 batch geocodes in a year, purchase a subscription.

To begin, start ArcMap, use the Tools menu, point to Geocoding, and select “Address Locator Manager.” Next, select “Add” in the Address Locator Manager dialog box. Under the “Look in” section, select GIS Servers, click “Add ArcGIS Server”, and then select Add. In the “Add ArcGIS Server” wizard, select “Use GIS Services”; then “Next.” Select Internet and enter the following ArcGIS Server URL: http://tasks.arcgisonline.com/arcgis/services. Click “Finish.” In the ArcGIS Server list, select "arcgis on tasks.arcgisonline.com" and “Add.” Select the Locators folder; then select “Add.” Select the locator you want to add to the ArcMap document (World Places, Europe addresses, or North American addresses), and select “Close.”

Next, geocode your addresses using the Tools, Geocode Addresses command. I created an address dataset for landmarks in a metropolitan area in comma separated value (csv) format, and then used Tools, Geocode Addresses. I was very pleased with a first-pass success rate of a 97%, and then resolved the 3 “ties.” I used [field1] &vbnewline & [field2] to stack the labels.

In what city are these addresses now geocoded? Think of other patterns that you could analyze using this geocoding service. How would the distribution of middle school students compare to those in university? Would this week’s crimes in a certain city display a pattern? What pattern do stores selling musical instruments in your community have?

For more instructions on using ArcGIS Online locators, examine Managing address locators in ArcMap in ArcGIS Desktop Help.

-- Joseph Kerski, Education Manager, ESRI.

ESRI extended its GIS career education and promotion through Web 2.0 social media distribution of four GIS careers - conservationist, helicopter pilot, GIS manager and health geographer. Students and job seekers can now find these GIS career profiles virtually anywhere they are on the Web. The videos have been distributed and optimized on dozens of video hosting sites. Go to YouTube, Veoh, Yahoo, MSN and you’ll find GIS careers. Go to Blinkx, Google, MetaCafe, Revver and you’ll find the videos. In fact the videos can be found on about 40 different video destinations. Making it easy to find those videos will help students explore GIS careers.

The GIS videos have been distributed on the “Career Corner Video Network.” Here are some links to them.

Video search engine results: Blinkx Google Yahoo

Selected individual destinations: YouTube Veoh Crackle Dailymotion Viddler

To see added content be sure to explore the videos on GIS.com.

Since the fall of 2007, the Geography Education National Implementation Project (GENIP) Standards Content Committee has been reviewing and preparing the second edition of Geography for Life: National Geography Standards. The second edition work is focused on reviewing the Six Essential Elements and 18 Standards with special emphasis on updating the knowledge statements, student performance statements, and exemplars that accompany each of the 18 Standards to clarify both their content and pedagogy. The updated draft document has been reviewed by both academic geographers and cognition and learning science experts. A second round of review will be done by people such as grade level experts including classroom teachers, curriculum developers, and preservice higher education faculty.

The current draft version of Geography for Life, 2nd Edition is now available for public review and comment. The draft contains the updated Standards including brief introductory essays, a section for parents, and a glossary for review. The draft will be available for public comment from June 15th to July 15th. Comments received by July 15, 2009 will be reviewed by the GENIP Standards Content Committee. The draft PDF document can be downloaded from the National Council for Geographic Education (NCGE) web site ( http://www.ncge.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageID=3403). For more information, please contact Susan Gallagher at sgallagher@aag.org.

While other ninth-graders were using their computers for homework or video games, students at Pearl-Cohn spent the past year using high-tech mapping software to plot the position of every Red Cross Emergency Shelter in Nashville.

Read more.

In a separate blog post at the ESRI Education Community, I investigated a claim that Bouvet Island is the world’s most remote uninhabited island using ArcGIS. At the same time, I mentioned that the definition of “remoteness” is subjective and therefore makes for an excellent classroom discussion and for investigation using GIS.

If you’ve flown to Hawaii, you may have been amazed at long the flight is, and wondered whether Hawaii is halfway across the Pacific Ocean. The Hawaiian Islands is the world’s most remote island chain with a sizeable population, estimated at 1.288 million in 2008 (US Census Bureau). Honolulu is the most remote major city over 500,000 population, because the nearest city of equal or greater size is San Francisco, 3,841 km distant.

Using ArcGIS and data from Book 2 of the Our World GIS Education series from ESRI Press, I set the data frame to Orthographic, centered near Maui at 21 North Latitude and 156 West Longitude so that I could see most of the Pacific Ocean on the map image.

Which is closer to Hawaii—California or southwest Alaska? Using the circle tool, above, I found out that these two are just about the same distance away—3,515 km. This is approximate as the measure tool was used at a small scale.

Is Hawaii halfway across the ocean? A visual assessment shows that this depends on the point at which one measures, for the Hawaiian Islands extend for hundreds of kilometers—over 1,000 including the seamounts. The southeastern inhabited Hawaiian islands are not quite halfway across the ocean: I measured with ArcGIS about 4,800 km from Hawaii to the nearest point on the Asian continent at Kamchatka, and 5,800 to Australia. Vladivostok (5,500 km) and Shanghai (6,400 km) are both farther than Kamchatka, and all are farther than North America.

A discussion about map projections, distances, and error is most appropriate here, because the measurements differ by up to 1,000 km depending on the map projection used. Try these tools to investigate other islands!

- Joseph Kerski, Education Manager, ESRI.

Software: Interest groups around the world are using mapping tools and internet-based information sources to campaign for change.

"For most people it is merely a handy tool to find a nearby pizzeria or get directions to a meeting. But mapping technology has matured into a tool for social justice."

Full story at the Economist.com

These past days (June 2-5) ESRI supported and attended the 12th annual AGILE Conference on Geographic Information Science, held at Leibniz University of Hannover, Germany. The conference was held in conjunction with an ISPRS workshop on high-resolution Earth imaging, making for even larger group of GI experts than usual.

In addition to participating in pre-conference workshops on the European Qualification Framework and Body of Knowledge (BoK) project and on Economic Value of Geoinformation, ESRI sponsored the attendance of 15 young researchers at the conference, coming from places like Russia, Serbia, Slovenia, China, Italy, Spain, Portugal, France, etc. During the event ESRI-Europe manager Frank Holsmuller and ESRI Inc. education director Michael Gould met with the students over lunch to discuss their on-going and future research interests. Most impressive was the critical mass of students developing software as part of their research. They were actively encouraged to consider joining their software with base ESRI software via the numerous API frameworks now available.

ESRI Press also was present at the AGILE 2009 conference, to present samples of the 2009 catalogue of GI books.

As in past years at the AGILE conferences, ESRI also sponsored the AGILE “best poster” and “best paper” awards. Winners were chosen by a voting process of their peers attending the conference.

The best poster award was given to Judith Milde (pictured) and Claus Brenner, of the host university (!) for a nicely developed poster called “Graph-based modeling of building roofs”.

The best paper award was given to paper presenter Rodrigo Silveira (Univ. Utrecht) and several coauthors from other institutions, for their paper “Detecting hotspots in Geographic Networks”. The paper outlines details of new algorithms for heuristic solutions to special point pattern cases in networks, such as identifying so-called hot spots for traffic accidents or other events. This paper, as well as those of the other 3 finalists and 20 other top-rated papers, are published in a Springer book “Advances in GI Science” (ISBN 978-3-642-00317-2).

Congratulations to the best poster and best paper winners!

Also congratulations to AGILE and to the local organizers for a well-run conference, with over 230 attendees, a strong program, and great social interaction.

See you at AGILE 2010 in Portugal!

- Mike Gould, Director of Higher Education

The bulk of the 2008-2009 entries to the Community Atlas have been checked and posted. Remember that this project challenges schools and youth groups to put together a profile of their community, with 10-20 maps and 1000-2500 words. Groups that complete a project within the general guidelines earn ESRI software, maintenance updates, books from ESRI Press, or classes on the ESRI Virtual Campus.

The announcement of the Model Project award will come later this summer. The Community Atlas will return for another year in the fall, and follow the same basic model. Classes and youth groups interested in earning software can start gearing up now by reading through the guidelines and starting with the free tools available.

Charlie Fitzpatrick, ESRI Education Manager

How many times have you said that you were in the “middle of nowhere?” You were probably being facetious: There are only a few places on the planet that might qualify as the most remote places on the planet. Indeed, as webcams, photographs by explorers, and satellite images allow us to peer at remote places from the ground and from above, these places are in some ways less remote than even a few years ago. Because some of these impacts are controversial, and because the very definition of “remoteness” is subjective, these topics are excellent for discussing in the classroom. They invite investigation using GIS.

One source cites Bouvet Island as the world’s most remote island. A GIS would help me find out if this is indeed the case. I started ArcGIS, added a countries layer from Book 2 of the Our World GIS Education series from ESRI Press, projected it to Eckert IV so that my subsequent measurements would be on a projected surface, added a satellite and ocean floor topographic image, and searched for Bouvet. Given Bouvet’s latitude, do you think it is covered by ice? How can you test your hypothesis? To find the nearest continent, I began drawing a circle beginning at Bouvet Island, stopping when it touched a continent, and noting the distance. I drew another circle, stopping when it touched the next nearest continent.

The circles above indicate that Bouvet lies 1,277 km from Antarctica and 2,515 km from Africa. These measurements are approximate as they were drawn a scale of 1:35,000,000. Noticing other islands to the northwest of Bouvet, I used the distance tool and some research to determine that 2,244 km lies between Bouvet and the nearest inhabited islands: Tristan de Cunha. Compare these measurements to other islands in the world to test the claim that Bouvet is the most remote island in the world.

Dig deeper into its history: How can Bouvet be part of Norway, when the measure tool indicates that Norway is nearly 14,000 km away?

- Joseph Kerski, Education Manager, ESRI.

Want to focus your students on global energy supplies or our carbon footprint? Trying to bring more GIS activities to your middle or high school students? The National Center for Rural STEM* has a dozen activities available for free download at http://www.isat.jmu.edu/stem/curriculum.html

These activities were written by Ms. Barbaree Duke and the Rural STEM team and edited by Dr. Bob Kolvoord. They cover a range of curricular areas and GIS skill levels. Topics include carbon footprint, world energy supply, invasive species, natural disasters, watersheds and much more. There are versions for AEJEE and ArcMap and all data are included along with student directions, teacher notes, and sample answers. Additional resources for all the activities are also available at http://www.isat.jmu.edu/stem/resources.html

The Center also has created a set of "podcasts" of basic GIS skills. These short videos are great reminders of how to do basic tasks in ArcMap. Produced by James Madison University students, they're available at http://www.isat.jmu.edu/stem/resources.html