GIS into Schools

Aim

Creating curriculum material for the teaching of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) principles and practice to Irish secondary school students, using Irish spatial data.

Partners

National Centre for Geocomputation (NCG) at the National University of Ireland Maynooth (NUIM)
ESRI-Ireland
Scoil Dara, Kilcock, Co. Kildare, Ireland

Description

The GIS into Schools initiative is a new venture to increase spatial awareness and both GIS and information technology (IT) skills among Irish secondary school students. The need to increase the scientific and IT content of school curricula has been widely acknowledged. Indeed, the aim of Core Unit 3 (Geographical Investigation and Skills) of the Department of Education's Leaving Certificate (Established) Geography Syllabus is to "... encourage the development of skills in handling spatial information ..." -- GIS technology is an ideal platform to achieve this.

A pilot project is currently underway between ESRI-Ireland, the NCG and Scoil Dara, Kilcock (a secondary school close to the NCG interested in exposing its students to technology and research). ESRI-Ireland will provide software and the NCG will provide teaching material for use by the school for the coming year at transition year level, with the view that this course could then be rolled out to interested schools nationwide, providing an option for students to learn GIS technology at school. Already, various institutions and government departments have supported this project with donations of data.

It is obvious that the material used in the lessons will be a major factor in the success of this pilot as regards attracting interest from secondary school students, and so it is essential that local and Irish datasets are used -- to capture the interest of the students, and to encourage their creativity and awareness of spatial and geographical issues at local and national levels. We do not use pre-existing teaching materials as:

They do not use Irish data, with the results that students will not learn about Ireland abd will be less interested
They, for the most part, do not teach basic GIS concepts, but only how to use the software

Our objectives are that the students:

Learn the basic concepts of GIS
Learn to use the GIS software package ArcView GIS
Become more spatially aware
Gain knowledge about their country

For more information on this project, go to http://ncg.nuim.ie/gisschools/.

Contact

Susanne Tschirner