This year the Foothills Research Institute (FRI) celebrated Geography Awareness Week and GIS Day with local grade 7 students.
On November 25th students from Hinton’s Crescent Valley School came to FRI’s office at the Hinton Training Centre (HTC) to learn about Global Positioning Systems (GPS) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS). The students learned about GPS, how it works and why they should care, which featured a fun game of GPS BINGO. Then in HTC’s computer lab the students saw how to upload the GPS points into a GIS and Google Earth and then hyperlink the points to photos of each location. Very Cool! Together we went through a simple analysis to find the best site to locate a golden arches near their school. This really captured the students’ attention and showed them a few GIS functions like buffering and selecting.
Then on November 30th FRI took GIS Day to a grade 7 class at Mountain View School in Hinton, AB. A fun game of hide and seek in the playground showed the kids how to use the GPS, about the satellites that orbit the earth and lines of latitude and longitude. Instead of the usual school walk the class went in search of some of Hinton’s geocaches. The freshly fallen snow did not deter them from finding five out of six caches!
FRI has hosted GIS Day events since 2003 but has made a few changes in order to keep up with the fact that these geospatial technologies are going mainstream. We now show the kids that they are using GPS and GIS in their daily lives and may not know it. FRI is now integrating social media, Google Earth, YouTube, and online and mobile GIS into the activities.