Abstract
The Zombie Habitat Model: Popular Culture and GIS Education
Track: Teaching with GIS Across the Curriculum
Authors: Edward Gonzalez-Tennant
Zombies are everywhere. We encounter them in graphic novels, at the movies, and even on our televisions. This paper draws on the trend of using zombies as an educational tool. This includes the Centers for Disease Control's (CDC) popular "Get a kit, Make a plan, Be prepared" campaign, which uses the concept of a zombie outbreak to encourage citizens to think about emergency preparedness. The author draws on the pop culture phenomenon of zombies for several reasons. This includes his successful use of zombies as an entertaining way to introduce students to GIS, particularly various spatial analysis techniques such as buffering, Euclidean distance, and network analysis. The author also discusses a conceptual "Zombie Habitat Model" constructed to introduce students to various methods of site selection analysis, and specifically the use of fuzzy logic. The paper's conclusion discusses various ways educators can utilize popular culture as an educational tool for GIS.