GIS Education Weekly: GeoTech Skills Competition, AAAS, Digital Humanities Minor

2015 Undergraduate Geospatial Technology Skills Competition Recap

Vince DiNoto, Director of the National Geospatial Technology Center of Excellence (The GeoTech Center) and his team shared some details from this year's competition.

• 13 total entries 
• 7 from universities, 6 from community colleges
• All participants used ArcGIS desktop
• GeoTech Center covered  travel expenses for the student finalist to URISA's GIS Pro 
• URISA provided conference registrations for the finalists 
• Both organization provided judges for the two rounds  

Looking ahead, the GeoTech Center will host a webinar featuring three of the four student finalists on December 16. There are plans for the 2016 competition including webinars in the spring semester to help instructors integrate the competition into their courses and some tweaks to the rules based on lessons learned.

GIS Open House at the Kauai Community College

The school received grant money (no word from whom) to build GIS courses. The hit at the GIS open house, attended by middle schoolers, was the Augmented Reality Sandbox.

“I took one of these Geographic Information Systems courses,” said Major Victor Aguilar, director of the Waimea High School JrROTC program. “The software is free, you just need to build it. But we can use these programs for some of the JrROTC training programs like creating topographic maps.”

COP 21 UNICEF Map

A digital mapping project called ‘Act Now For Tomorrow,’ which was recently launched by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), is helping young people around the world identify climate issues in their communities and find ways to address them.

The story UN story didn't include a link, but I found the actual map. Each marker on the Google Map leads to a report from a team at that location revealing local climate change impacts. I understand some 500 youth from 65 countries participated.