Building Landscape Visualizations for Instruction

Author: Robert MacArthur
Organization: University of Arizona

218 Forbes
Tucson, AZ 85721
USA

Phone: 520-621-2489
Fax: 520-626-8688
robmac@ag.arizona.edu

Higher education courses in certain disciplines use GIS extensively, but rarely is GIS used in large, general education courses because the learning curve for the software is too steep. Visualization provides an instructional avenue into spatial data modeling by providing students with powerful visual tools.

At the University of Arizona, students in English composition classes are using visualization in land management applications (see  http://item.pacific.ru/) as an aid to collaborative learning and visual impact analysis. In freshman art courses, students are working on a campus mall redesign. They insert their sculptures into synthetic scenes. Fellow students, their parents, and the public can access these scenes through a Web browser, walk around the sculptures, move them, scale them, change their color, and so forth (see  http://ag.arizona.edu/agnet/icac/).

The heightened interactivity of this visualization-based learning model is pedagogically appealing. It gives students with very limited technological skills access to complex spatial data.