Using GIS in a community educaiton project

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.

The students created digital panoramas of several scenes on the street to visualize where they would locate benches, and what views you would get from the bench.

Panoramas of downtown Tucson
The students worked with an imaginary budget. They could choose from different lighting, or benches, water fountains or plants, but the project cannot exceed the total budget. There are other factors taken into account with their choices; for example, the plants are judges on aesthetics and shade, versus allergies they induce, or how much water they.

These are the same factors and constraints that go into real-world decision making. The students had to justify their choices, and this process gets them beyond mere tool-learning into understanding how spatial reasoning really operates.

In the third week of the class, the students moved beyond gathering pure physical data, and began collecting cultural data. This included video and audio interviews with persons who work along Scott Street, restaurateurs, theatre managers, proprietors and the like. There are several historical structures on this stretch of Scott Street, and some eateries that are well-known for some part of their cuisine, or peculiar ambience. For example, Dizzy G’s restaurant is wellknown for its diner food, especially its chicken-fired steak. The Poca Cosa restaurant boasts a chef’s special that is special, or unique, to anyone who requests it. The chef puts it together with whatever is on hand at that moment, and two persons who order the “special” simultaneously, may get something entirely different from each other (see http://ag.arizona.edu/agnet/cte/tpacav.html for interviews.) Each week the class also got talks from domain professionals. For example, in the second week the class was accompanied on a field trip by an aborist from a local nursery. Later in the week, they were visited by someone from Trees for Tucson, a community organization that subsidizes trees for those who want to plant them. Potential tree locations were mapped into an ArcView event theme, and posted to the map server, then used in presentations with accompanying pictures of the trees and the locations to provide those attending the presentation with as much visual evidence as possible of the proposed improvement to Scott Avenue.

The class also worked briefly with Spatial Analyst and 3D Analyst to learn some topology. They learned how to measure distances, where water might collect, and line-of-sight and shading models to help them place benches for viewing. The class reported their findings to the Web site, and used PowerPoint to make a presentation to the selected audience at the end of the class. When word of the presentation got around, TV and radio programs showed up and the project was aired in several local news venues. The project results are on line at http://ag.arizona.edu/agnet/cte/tpac.html, including student presentations.

Student presentation including budget in Excel
Experience
The class was only 4 weeks long, June 17 to July 3, and was taught for the first time, to ages ranging from 9 to 13 with no previous GIS experience, so expectations were modest. Nonetheless, the experience was very positive. The students learned GIS skills, were enthusiastic, and are eager for more. This project also generated curriculum content for other teachers to use. The course was primarily taught by University of Arizona undergraduate teacher interns in science education from the NSF-funded Collaboration to Advance Teaching Technology and Science (CATTs http://www.geo.arizona.edu/catts/about.html.) These interns have collected the TPAC class into a model for other K12s and after-school programs. One of these spin-off projects has already begun at http://ag.arizona.edu/agnet/rogers/

Evaluation
The project was evaluated at 3 levels:

Technology skills
A test of simple tasks, such as taking a location using GPS, using a digital camera to make a panorama, or using a layout in ArcView
Spatial reasoning
Testing on simple GIS concepts, such as how computer mapping differs from paper mapping, what topology means, or things being “topologically related” in a GIS, or why nearness matters, and the like.
Real-world decision making
The most valuable skills of all, since they help the students find careers. They include data collection, critical thinking with multi-variate objectives, modeling, and presentation skills. All these are very necessary to success, and to becoming part of community project making.

Participants in this Project
City of Tucson
Pascua Yaqui Reservation
Pima County
Pima Community College
The Planning Center
Trees for Tucson
Tucson Clean and Beautiful
Tucson Downtown Alliance
Tucson Pima Arts Council
University of Arizona

Figures and Illustrations

Figure 1: Pima County Land Information Systems

Figure 2: A Portion of downtown Scott Street, Santa Rita Hotel (Clarion) which opened in 1904 is lower right. Poca Cosa Restaurant inside. Upper left is the old Post Office, proposed for conversion to a downtown center.

Figure 3: ArcIMS site where the class mounts data, and an example of one of the panoramas

Figure 4: Two of the Benches Available

Figure 4 – Oak and mesquite trees