Maps are fascinating. They help us get from one place to another and anticipate what we will find there. In the generation of today’s adults, maps told us about highways, streets, points of interest, populations, and mileage. If we went to the library to search through almanacs, marketing atlases, government documents, and textbooks we could put together detailed information about economics, population change, and health statistics.
Today, businesses, government, and social science researchers have a new tool as important as paper maps have been for prior centuries. Curious students in our local high schools, middle schools, and 4-H clubs are doing much more than we could with our paper maps using a new tool called GIS, which stands for Graphical Information Systems or Geographic Information Sciences.
Our cars and smartphones use GPS, or Global Positioning Systems, to do what we used to with paper maps. GIS goes farther. If we look at any of the COVID-19 statistics, we know we can find data on relatives in counties anywhere in the nation. But those maps barely scratch the surface. Last quarter, Suburban Living, Fuquay-Varina had a story about our town’s Planning Department. Director Pam Davison introduced us to our GIS map, where we can find our house, its owner, what its zone is, whether it is in a flood plain, where the sewers are, who maintains the street, and on and on. You can also go to the NC Department of Transportation maps and find out how many cars travel on nearby roads every day.
Formerly known as Environmental Systems Research Institute, ESRI was founded more than a half-century ago in Redlands, CA, and is now a billion-dollar corporation that provides over 40% of the world market for GIS software and has nearly 4,000 employees. The company also sponsors an annual user convention and competitions involving the use of the software for youth projects that serve the public good.
More than a decade ago, Wake County 4-H development recruited for part-time STEM educator Thomas Ray, Ph.D., who is the Senior Director of Educational Programming of the Poe Center for Health Education. One of the first things he did was learn about after-school programs for using ESRI software. That was in 2006-7. “We got the grant and used GIS and GPS to collect data and do geocaches.” Geocaching is an outdoor game where people use geographical coordinates, like our cars’ or phones’ navigational systems, to hide or find a box hidden beyond a park path. By the next summer, 4-H camps started incorporating the project. Engaged high school students from Fuquay-Varina High School formed Dr. Ray’s first GIS Club.
Soon the club went to the annual convention in San Diego as a team. Dr. Ray reports, “That first year, we used funding from the John Rex Endowment for the travel. ESRI paid for the registration. We met other 4-Hers out there and connected with a group from Oregon. We had some Spanish speakers at the conference from the Dominican Republic. Within the next year, we did two projects in Panama with support from our Fuquay-Varina and Clayton Rotary Clubs. Our focus was on equipping young people in Panama with the technology. We did a lot of mapping with abused, abandoned, and neglected children in Panama. We trained some nursing students and equipped them as well to map indigenous peoples and related public health issues. We trained people at one of the schools in the mountainous area. In total, we spent two weeks there helping young people to investigate issues in their community. Back home, we did a presentation on gang tagging in Fuquay-Varina.”
Improved accuracy in mapping changed the world a few centuries ago and today social science depends on it for much of our social knowledge. Today, the use of GIS for research is transforming social science as much as the map did in our nation’s early history. But the transformation is not only among the educated elites in graduate schools. Research is progressively replacing the rote memorization of facts all the way down to the middle-school level. A powerful example is shown in the work of a Fuquay-Varina Middle School teacher, Justin Vein, in helping to beautify their school. Any school-based club has a teacher. Students in the GIS Club that Mr. Vein leads collected information about their campus, used ESRI’s Survey123 mobile application to make a map of areas needing attention, and used their results to get funding for a campus beautification day.
The GIS Clubs are active in Fuquay-Varina at our Middle School and High School. There is also an at-large club that serves the whole county, at the Centennial Campus at the Hunt Library. Anybody can sign up. The clubs meet anywhere from once to twice per month. This summer the at-large group met two or three times per month. The 4-H holds both individual and club competitions. Winners have usually involved members with multiple years of experience.
Recently, the at-large group worked with the Center for Black Health and Equity (www.centerforblackhealth.org). Six high-school students began by making branded base maps. They started with map templates provided in the online vector base map editor. Then they crafted their maps with color schemes, textures, and built-in style-editing options in the application to select a font and change colors. Next, they input county health-ranking data for the life expectancy of the general and black populations. To those basic data, they added details like income, infant mortality, proportions of children in poverty, HIV rates, hospitalizations for strokes and heart disease for people over 65, number of hospital beds, and adult smoking rates.
Another group recently worked on the impacts of climate change. Their names are prominently displayed on the important poster then produced, which is online at https://wake.ces.ncsu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/ClimateIndexMap.png. Student Sahil Pontula led the project group which included work by Cielo Alvarez and Ameen Zafiruddin as well as Dr. Ray and consultation with Wake County GIS Analyst Bill Shroyer. The COVID-19 maps for North Carolina that many of us are familiar with look similar to theirs. But this group went several steps further by combining five different sources of information into a single index of vulnerability. Their poster shows five maps of North Carolina surrounding one large state map. Each small map answers one of the five questions. What are the chances of floods? How many people work outdoors? What is the percent of poverty? What is the percent of people over age 65? And how many days over 90 degrees are there? Using this data, they created an index displayed in the large middle map. If you know how to pinpoint Fuquay-Varina on their map, you can see that we fared pretty well on their index. To check other places, look at the poster itself by clicking on the link above.
Those results are fascinating, but the process of getting there in one or two meetings a month took over one and a half years. They began with the question, “What makes someone vulnerable to climate change?” To get answers, they visited NCSU’s Center for Geospatial Analytics to work with Professor Walt Robinson who is co-director of the Climate Change & Society Program, to generate a long list of possibilities. He pulled down a wall of screens to help the group narrow down to five variables that they could get data on. Email notes to Mr. Shroyer helped with these decisions. Contacts with the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services were also helpful in obtaining the data.
But getting the data is not the whole story. Cielo Alvarez is president of the Fuquay-Varina High School club. Her brother is a prior club member. She did a lot to promote the club at the high school, even reaching out to Dr. Ray to help get a new cohort going. Then, there is the technology. Corporations pay enough to cover ESRI’s billion dollars in earnings. But the group gets their premium access to ESRI’s ArcGIS software free because they only use it for educational purposes.
Toward the end of our interview, I asked Dr. Ray “What can members do with what they have learned?” He had many answers. “I’ve had students go into public health, GIS directly, design, some in education or sales. The experience opens themselves up to adapt to any field, even business analysis. They can answer questions like ‘Where would you put a business?’ and ‘What are the socioeconomics or other market variables that would make it work?’ According to the United States Dept of Labor Statistics, GIS is in the top three emerging fields along with nanotech and biotech.”
If one of your children has an interest in maps, it is worthwhile to think of what the students in these examples have learned. If you look only at the design process the students used, you will find a lot. I once did 80 interviews of faculty in 20 disciplines of the Savannah College of Art and Design. When I collected their interviews together, I found a six-step process. They first formulate a question and envision a solution. Next, they specify what they will need and prepare themselves to implement it. Throughout the process, they query over and over again. To make the steps easy to remember, I called these the FESPI-Q design process standing for Formulate, Envision, Specify, Prepare, Implement, and Query.
Now look at the projects just described. The question of how vulnerable people in different regions are to climate change was their formulation. They envisioned the answer based on their five questions plus their graphical choice to make a large map with the index surrounded by little maps with their answers to their five questions. They specified their product by finding the data for the five maps and using it to calculate their index. Then they prepared by putting the data in ESRI maps and finally, they implemented their results in the poster. That is fabulous work by a group of high school students.
The educational potential reaches far beyond mapping techniques. How many classrooms involve consultation with leaders in major academic departments? How many classrooms require students to make innovative use of real data that has the potential to change their communities? How many classrooms involve students in collaborative projects where each learns how to tap into their fellow students’ skills to collectively craft a regionally or nationally recognized product? How many classrooms result in trips to remote cities to apply their skills? Such classrooms exist but joining a GIS club ranks high in opportunities. Any student with even a casual interest in maps can join. Within a year or two of active membership, they have leadership and design experiences that are likely to change their futures.