Last month, UCSB Geography hosted two classes of high school students from Laguna Blanca School in Santa Barbara for a GIS seminar. The participating students came from Alethea Paradis’ AP Human Geography and Landon Neustadt’s AP Environmental Science classes. The Geography department was contacted by the two teachers about a possible visit to the department during a previously scheduled field trip to UCSB. Their goal was to find an engaging way of introducing students to GIS during their time on campus. As a result of this request, three graduate students (Josh Bader, Kitty Currier, and Zia Salim) put together a presentation and lab exercise.
The presentation started with a brief introduction to GIS and then provided examples of real world applications that utilize GIS. The bulk of the time, however, was reserved for the students to get hands-on experience with GIS. The students were given a laboratory exercise from the Geography 176 series in a trial by fire of sorts – although the lab was modified to provide more explicit directions to get to the proper menus and functions, most of the original (university-level!) content was the same. Impressively, the Laguna Blanca students handled the challenge very well and all of the students successfully completed the exercise during their two hours in the Star Lab. Outreach events like this provide awareness about the power of geospatial technologies and help to connect UCSB in general, and the Geography department in particular, to college-bound learners in the surrounding community.
Editor’s note: Thanks to Josh Bader for putting this article together!
