mbutts@heraldsun.com; 419-6684
DURHAM – Midway through the school day Friday, Brianna Williams decided to take a trip to Columbus, Ohio, to visit her father. Meanwhile, her classmate Naylea Jacobo flew to see the Christ the Redeemer statue towering over Rio de Janeiro. Fellow fifth-grader Gabriela Arias cruised the streets of Durham, happy to see that her family’s home was as she left it in the morning.
But just minutes later, the three students were snapped back to reality in their Holt Elementary School computer lab, their journeys fueled not by gasoline but by the GIS – or geographic information systems – that inform the Google Earth virtual globe program.
Gwen Dorman’s class was the first of four Holt fifth-grade classes to be exposed to GIS – a way of organizing data spatially – by GIS analysts who work with the city’s Technology Solutions Department. Sessions with the other classes will continue this week.
“You get to see exactly where everything is,” Jacobo said, mesmerized as she “flew” from Brazil to the Sydney Opera House.
GIS analyst Robert Cushman crouched beside the 11-year-old, showing her how to view aerial imagery of the landmark dating back to the year 2000.
The kid-friendly wonder of Google Earth is a far cry from the work performed in the GIS division of the city’s Technology Solutions Department, where analysts organize data on everything from crimes to flood insurance rates. Before heading to the computer lab, Cushman and fellow GIS analyst Tyler Waring demonstrated a mapping tool (available at http://bit.ly/ysflXH) that allows users to identify easily school assignments from a home address.
To illustrate the difference that GIS technology makes, Cushman asked the students to locate their homes or school on paper maps within 30 seconds. They hunched over the maps, furiously searching for familiar street names or landmarks. At the end of the 30 seconds, just one student said he’d located his home.
“Now we don’t use maps like this anymore – very rarely,” Cushman said. “The maps we work with are made to be easy to use” – like traffic maps on morning TV newscasts and those used by vehicle navigation systems.
“What we’re doing now, we couldn’t do three years ago,” he said. “This is the fastest-changing industry in the world. As we collect more information with satellites, GPS systems, mobile phones, all kind of things, there’s more geographic information available than we know what to do with.
Since Cushman started in the field 15 years ago, GIS has come a long way from enormous computers and the need for users to be at a high level of technical proficiency to make sense of data, he said, and he looks forward to what the future of GIS holds.
“One of two or five of you will be doing things with GIS that I can’t even imagine yet,” he told the students.
The idea for the GIS division to work with elementary school students was born in the mind of Robin Dixon, who works in the city’s Neighborhood Improvement Services Department. After seeing the GIS folks make another presentation, it “clicked,” she said.
It’s a great fit with the fifth-grade curriculum, Dorman said. Her students are studying land forms and geometry, both of which are involved in GIS.
Waring has been working in GIS for about 10 years. Before he learned about GIS, he wasn’t “really that interested in computers.”
“I couldn’t think of how to apply computers to what I was interested in, and basically GIS was that way,” he said. “It’s kind of like paving a path for imagination and a way to solve real-world problems.”
