GIS Council hosted workshop to celebrate GIS Day 2006
December 5, 2006
The Penn State Geospatial Information Systems (GIS) Council hosted a workshop for Mount Nittany
Middle School 7th graders as part of the eighth annual worldwide GIS Day™ observed Wednesday,
November 15, 2006.
Tina Enderlein, Penn State’s GIS Officer who organized the event, included a variety of sessions designed to introduce the students to GIS. During the morning sessions, Beth King, GIS specialist/instructor with the e-Education Institute, led an ArcGIS lesson which provided them with GIS basics and Michelle Zeiders, applications programmer with the Social Sciences Research Institute, conducted a field exercise on geocaching utilizing GPS units. The students used the compass on the GPS units to find six preprogrammed waypoints, such as the Nittany Lion Shrine and Old Main.
In the afternoon sessions, Ryan Baxter, a GIS specialist with Pennsylvania Spatial Data Access (PASDA) and Brian Bills, GIS specialist with the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute, demonstrated the popular Google Earth program and mapping applications available on the PASDA website and Jodi Vender, coordinator of undergraduate advising and alumni relations in the Department of Geography, presented information on GIS jobs and career options.
Most students were not familiar with GIS before attending this workshop. The students especially enjoyed using Google Earth and learning how to locate the neighborhood where they lived. Many students expressed that they would use this new technology in their studies. They thought that it would be most helpful in their current social studies project where they are writing reports about other countries. They liked being able to visualize a location’s topography. Other students reported that their favorite part of the workshop was the GPS session – they liked being outside!
GIS Day is an event where users of GIS technology open their doors to schools, businesses, and the general public to showcase real-world applications of this extraordinary technology and allow people to see and experience firsthand GIS technology and its extensive applications and benefits.
Held as part of National Geographic Society’s Geography Awareness Week and Geography Action! initiative, GIS Day is an international grassroots event to promote geographic literacy in schools, communities, and organizations. This year, millions of children and adults in more than 85 countries and all 50 U.S. states participated in events such as corporate open houses, hands-on workshops, community expos, school-wide assemblies, mapping projects, geography games, global positioning systems scavenger hunts, and more.
For more information on GIS at Penn State visit: www.gis.psu.edu.
Photos by John Murphy and Patricia Craig
Contact
Tina Enderlein
Telephone: 814.865.1221
Email: tme10@psu.edu
Patricia Craig
Telephone: 814.863-0037
Email: plc103@psu.edu