A test project in the new Student Data Mapper. Take the quick poll and help test the system - or create your own project.The Diagonal Survey at The Student Data Mapper -
A test project in the new Student Data Mapper. Take the quick poll and help test the system - or create your own project.
White House Highlights STEM Innovators in the Disability Community as "Champions of Change" -
….the White House will honor 14 individuals as Champions of Change for leading the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) for people with disabilities in education and employment.
Seven Ideas: GIS for Geocaching with Scouts, Youth, or Anyone -
For the last several years now, every spring and fall, I volunteer to help the local Girl Scout council, not unlike many you GeoMentors. We plan and implement a large geocaching event. The event, now called “The Geocache Party” typically has 100 to 300 Girl Scouts involved. If you have ever planned a sizablegeocaching (or Open Caching) event with several activities, you know placing, tracking, and 
reclaiming your caches can be a real nightmare. For a single event last year, we placed nearly 100 caches across 175 wooded acres. Just try to remember where all those caches are when you pick them up, at the end of an event!
Like many outdoor geo-activities, geocaching can be enhanced by using GIS. To support individual (traditional) geocaching or large geocaching events, I have assembled my seven ideas for leveraging GIS – to plan, manage, or even evaluate your caches and performance.
By the way, both the Boy Scouts of America and the Girl Scouts now offer Geocaching badges, each at certain age levels.
Happy Geocaching!
- Tom Baker, Esri Education Manager
Discovering: ArcGIS Explorer Online (instructional resource) -
Discover some the basic features of ArcGIS Explorer Online. This two-page MS Word document activity walks students through several core functions in this webmap tool. Lab requires Internet connection and MS Silverlight plug-in.
Computational Thinking with GIS (at Esri Ed Community) -
The educational value of Computational Thinking (CT) was first noted in 2006 and is now largely considered an emerging concept of magnitude from educational organizations like CSTA, ISTE, and AACE SITE. Other organizations with a focus broader than education, like the Center for Computational Thinkinghave signaled the importance of CT for STEM or the University of Colorado’s scalable game design effort.
“CT is an approach to solving a problem that empowers the integration of digital technologies with human ideas. It does not replace an emphasis on creativity, reasoning and critical thinking, but it re-emphasizes those skills while highlighting ways to organize a problem so that a computer can help” (p 8).
CT principles and methods span all academic areas in ways designed to amplify critical thinking and problem solving with technology. Students who use CT are creators, designers, and developers of solutions and systems that improve their lives and world around them by integrating technology into their thinking and action – with dramatically improved results.
CT isn’t just “Augmented Reality”, it’s more akin to “Augmented Problem Solving”.
The ISTE Leadership Toolkit offers more definition. CT is a problem-solving process that includes but is not limited to) the following characteristics:
GIS and geospatial technologies in classrooms completely embody the definition of Computational Thinking: gathering and analyzing data using a variety of models or tools in order to create solution representations to real world problems. The processes of solving problems with GIS or PBL-GIS are powerful approaches to education and creating technology-enabled lifelong problem solvers. GIS can be a critical tool in the efforts and approaches to teaching with technology – Computational Thinking.
Learn more about the CT Leadership Toolkit [PDF] or the Teacher Resource Guide [PDF] and include geotechnologies in your instruction, within the CT framework, models, vocabulary, and implementation.
- Tom Baker, Esri Education Manager
Made with Paper
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
8pm Eastern/ 7pm Central/6pm Mountain/5pm Pacific
Tom Baker[video]
“We suggest that spatial thinking is at the heart of many great discoveries in science, that it underpins many of the activities of the modern workforce, and that it pervades the everyday activities of modern life.” — Learning to Think Spatially: GIS as a Support System in the K-12 Curriculum (2006), page 1.
This is a self-portrait taken with the Xbox 360 Kinect’s near-infrared camera, measuring distance from camera. We used the Kinect during NSTA 2012 to navigate the planet in ArcGIS Explorer Desktop - which attendees loved!
The solid lines are from the skeletal tracking software. They collapsed when the camera could only track my head and shoulders.
Girl Scouting and STEM (Kansas City)
The Microsoft Xbox 360 Kinect is one of most powerful consumer-oriented 
“Natural User Interface” devices available today. Its near-infrared camera produces 3D motion data of anything in front of the it and coupled with a standard webcam and quadraphonic microphone, the device is jammed pack with input sensors. The Microsoft Education team even promotes Kinect has prepared over a 100 lessons and activities to promote “active” learning. Microsoft also claims the Kinect may be useful as an assistive technology device and in promoting collaboration.
What you might not know is that the Kinect can plug to your computer and be used as an interface device!
Think about young students actively controlling a 3D ArcGIS Explorer Desktop globe – investigating the Earth while moving arms, legs, and torso to direct navigation, display data, or conduct an analysis. What an interesting way to engage young, energetic learners.
Last week, I demonstrated this concept at the meeting of the Esri Education Team. I connected my Kinect to my Windows laptop and we took turns controlling ArcGIS Explorer Desktop! To get the environment setup, I used the USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies recommendations. This set-up requires installing a set of drivers and then running the FAAST toolkit. Basically, FAAST allows you to create a mapping between Kinect-detected body movements to keyboard strokes. So, when I raise my right arm, the World spins right!
How to make the Kinect work for you:
Remember, these steps might require a little extra “tech-savvyness” and the FAAST toolkit from USC is an open source (neither a Microsoft nor Esri) project. Use at your own risk.
Post your comments and links to YouTube videos using the Kinect to control ArcGIS Explorer Desktop below. Many of you should be able to create a better, more fluid interaction with ArcGIS Explorer Desktop. Good luck!
Enjoy,
Tom