I have created a GIS base map of the school district. When zoomed in to 1:16000 the local topo map appears. 7th Grade students locate their house on MapQuest or Google Earth (if MapQuest fails to locate their address) they then find their house on the GIS topo on my computer. Placing the zoom "+" cursor on their house they can find their "address" in "State Plane 1983" coordinates. This information is transfered to an Excel CSV and added to the GIS as an "event theme". Now we has 75 student "reporting stations" (one for each kid). Right now they are calculating their "bus commute time" and will plot it as dot size. Planned for the future: children in household, snow fall data and temperature minimums. Any suggestions for other data collections across an entire school district???

This post was edited by LuAnn Dahlman on Sep, 2007
Very cool, Nat! Doing the groundwork to establish the reporting stations is brilliant! In addition to weather stuff, do you think you might be able to do onset of fall colors or bud burst in the spring? (I don't know the scale of the map nor the range in elevations, so I can't really predict if you'd see any variation). I can see that these would be rich opportunities for discussing how precise your data collection protocols would have to be. I hope the students will come up with some parameters to measure too.

This post was edited by Nathaniel Smith on Sep, 2007
The file is the district map of commute times (sum of coming and going).

I also created an imaginary student called "average" and the dot relating to him/her is the geometric average location and the average commute time. The "average" student spend 44 minutes on the bus each day and lives about 3km from the school.

Mass GIS files

Here are four MassGIS files that Nat uses with this activity. All the files are in this one file and need to be unzipped.

Topo Map

Here is the image data that Nat uses. This data is zipped and contains three files.

Excel file

Here is the Excel file used in this activity.