Abstract


Students Flourish by Mixing Research with Learning in GIS and Cartography
Track: Educational Research and Teacher Education
Author(s): Cynthia Brewer, Barbara Buttenfield

Involving students in research is a strong enticement to learn complex tools and critical thinking skills. Our undergraduate and graduate students assisted development of ScaleMaster with Esri. ScaleMaster organizes changes in symbol design and choices of features from databases with different resolutions through a continuous range of scales (e.g., 1:5,000 all the way to 1:5,000,000). Grads developed the initial tool for a topographic base map project and edited and generalized data for the geodatabase.



Undergraduates examined symbol designs for varied map purposes (such as public safety, tourism, topographic, and election topics) through scale change to enhance this core conceptual tool.





Cynthia Brewer
Pennsylvania State University
Department of Geography, 302 Walker Building
University Park , PA 16802-5011
US
Phone: (814) 865-5072
E-mail: cbrewer@psu.edu

Barbara Buttenfield
University of Colorado
Campus Box 260
Boulder , CO 80309
US
Phone: 303-492-3618
E-mail: babs@colorado.edu