Recently, the Geography Visibility and Outreach Committee had the exciting opportunity to share geographic thinking and remote sensing concepts with young people from around the county. On Sunday, October 20th, Geography graduate students James Allen, Bonnie Bounds, Helen Chen, Kitty Currier, Heather Frazier, Susan Meerdink, Marcela Suarez, and Haiyun Ye hosted an interactive table at the Santa Barbara County 4-H’s second annual National Youth Science Day event.
The 4-H organization is the nation’s largest youth development organization, emphasizing hands-on learning activities in the areas of citizenship, science, and healthy living (source). The 4-H National Youth Science Day is geared toward youth of all ages, and it is meant to spark an early passion for STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education and to encourage young people to consider these paths of study and future careers. This year’s 4-H National Science Experiment theme, “Maps and Apps,” provided a perfect opportunity for the Geography Department to encourage attendees to be geospatial thinkers and to start thinking about the world around them from a geographer’s point of view.
Over sixty youth and their families viewed themselves in a new light when Susan Meerdink pointed a thermal camera at the crowd and they saw their heat signatures on a monitor. The thermal imager demonstrated one form of information beyond visible images that scientists can use when remotely sensing urban environments. The students were also able to look at aerial imagery of Santa Barbara in both visible and thermal bands to pick out the extra features that geographers can find using thermal imagers.
At another station, students used critical thinking skills as they assembled aerial photographs of an Indonesian island, taken using a kite-mounted camera. Kitty Currier shared parts of her kite aerial photography project to encourage students to think like geographers while combining images to see the larger picture at hand. Students and parents alike learned that thinking outside the box can go a long way when assembling groups of images!
All in all, the event allowed youth from around the county to explore the excitement of STEM fields by interacting with aquatic creatures, playing with robots, and seeing the world from a geographer’s perspective. It was an exciting event, but the real reward is the long-term potential to have more students enter STEM disciplines. Hopefully, some of the students at the event will choose to be geospatial thinkers by pursuing Geography!
The fun will continue in February when members of the Visibility and Outreach Committee will offer a county-wide 4-H project to teach participants about GIS, GPS, and cartography in honor of the “Maps and Apps” theme. Attendees of the multi-day event will have the opportunity to design and map their own scavenger hunt on the UCSB campus. For more information about this exciting event, you can email the Visibility and Outreach Committee at ucsb.geog.outreach@gmail.com.
Editor’s note: Kudos and thanks to the Geography graduate student Visibility and Outreach Committee for their commitment to this terrific outreach project and for contributing this article to our web site.
