Using GIS in a community educaiton project
Robert MacArthur
University of Arizona 218 Forbes
Tucson, AZ, 85716
Abstract
The Tucson Community Technology Education Network (TCTEN -
http://ag.arizona.edu/agnet/tcten/) grew out of a GIS cooperative between the city
of Tucson, Pima County and various other entities in Tucson, including the
University of Arizona. One objective of the cooperative is to extend technology
education into the community. TCTEN has taken on that objective, with youth,
neighborhood organizations, and small business as primary target audiences.
This paper describes a learning project that took place last summer with a group
of middle school youths.
The lesson plans revolved around Scott Street, a part of Tucson’s old downtown,
which is being converted into a pedestrian attraction. The students collected
GPS data to build GIS point themes, used digital cameras to build panoramas,
and took audio/video interviews with restaurant owners, museum curators,
theatre operators, and residents of several blocks of this street. They used this
data to recommend where benches, trees, water fountains and lighting should be
placed to make Scott more appealing. They presented their work to parents,
professional planners and the City Council.
Initial Premises for the course
Course content centered on two principles:
- Technology education should not be taught as pure technology to a
non-technical audience. It has to have a practical meaning and a realworld,
local context to be educationally useful to someone outside the
technical domain. So a successful course will use Tucson data, and
emphasize the practical, problem-solving dimension of GIS tools to the
students.
- The students were also given constraints. They had to work within a
budget, for example, and make trade-offs. This teaches them how to
model, which is a process of assigning weights and values to different
components in decision-making problems.
TCTEN members worked hard to keep these objectives paramount and
achieved a very high success.
Structure of the course
The course was designed around a real-world application to revitalize
Scott Street, one of Tucson’s oldest downtown thoroughfares. Each class
member was given $15,000 to improve 8 blocks stretching from Pennington to
14th Street, using benches, trees, water fountains. The students collected data
and posted it to a Web mapper. They were visited by domain experts who
advised them on the benefits of different trees to an urban environment, and they
took field trips to get input from various merchants and other establishments on
the street through aural and video interviews.
They were forced to make trade-offs regarding their choices. $15,000 is
not a lot of money and so they budget constrained to begin with, But they had
also to choose between vegetation that would create good shade but make a
mess, or was allergenic. These real-world choices were educated with visits by
planning professionals. These professionals also reviewed the reports of the
students along with parents and members of City Council
Community Map Builder
The class was taught through the Tucson Pima Arts Council (TPAC)
summer program in downtown Tucson, as part of TPAC’s extended multimedia
education. The students met 4 days a week from 8:30 to 12:00 for 4 weeks. Each
week the class spent the early cool hours collecting data and interviews on the
street. These data were mapped to locations using GPS, and later posted to the
map builder shown above. The class took building data the first week, vegetation
the second, and cultural data (interviews) in the 3rd week. Software for the class,
ArcVIew 3.2a, was donated by ESRI to the program.
