Tech Integration: Exploring and Mapping Physical Space
“Actually I think Art lies in both directions — the broad strokes, big picture but on the other hand the minute examination of the apparently mundane. Seeing the whole world in a grain of sand, that kind of thing.” -Peter Hammill
Human intelligence begins in dealing with physical space. The toddler who reaches out, recoils from, looks from all sides, grabs, topples something over, cannot reach something — all of this makes a mental map of the physical world. Once the world is explorable and manipulable, in fact as well as in thought, we can organize our thoughts.
At the furthest extension of this process, we find geometry, the pure abstraction of space in search of truth. Calculus and physics work together to make the implicit properties of space and time into real and manipulable entities. In human geography, we track the multiple dimensions of terrain, climate, resources and human behaviors, extend them across space and time, and hope to arrive at a story that makes sense. Something similar happens in modeling changes in earth systems (climate, geology, biological systems) over time and space.
This long induction from toddler’s playtime to pure abstraction does not happen on its own. At many points we must internalize something that is no obvious or tangible: Change over time, the interaction of forces, the categories lurking behind concrete examples.
There is also the question of connecting small, particular data into a cohesive whole. To make sense of a place involves getting numbers, visuals, anecdotes, shape, movement, forces and time to behave as actors in a single story. Let’s take an example:
Australia has been geologically stable for a very long time. While other land masses have been periodically churned by plate tectonics and glaciation, Australia has largely stood still. With no new land forming, Australia has been worn smooth.
Rabbits, introduced into Australia in 1859, exploded in population. They ate the native vegetation, exposing the already-thin population to massive erosion.
Given the weathering and the stripping of its vegetation, Australia’s top soil is poor. It’s thin and low in nutrition because of weathering.
From this article: “It takes about 1,000 years to form about 20mm of soil …so that’s .02mm per year — you can’t even measure it. One cubic metre of soil lost is .1mm — so if you lose one cubic metre of soil off your paddock you’ve just lost five years worth of soil formation,” he said. The context: How to keep the occasional torrential downpour from tearing Australia’s topsoil away?
As we try to understand Australia’s human geography, we have to take the topsoil into account. Why is the uninhabited portion of Australia so large? What does it mean that aboriginal lands are on regions that are both remote (see this map for a fascinating demonstration) and poor in topsoil? Why does the old practice of building cities where crops grew serve us poorly now? What decisions should the interested parties make now?
From this rapid-fire journey, let’s think of the understandings we are folding into a single story:
- Plate tectonics
- Long geological process (weathering)
- Human history and the effect on the environment
- Exponential population growth (think rabbits)
- Mathematics (calculating topsoil loss)
- Public policy
Some of these involve serious abstraction. The concept of exponential growth, for instance, never quite makes sense as the dramatic phenomenon that it is when we read a definition, or even run numbers. So we dramatize:
Now we have a visual that synthesizes progression through time (in the video) and expansion in shape (the shape of the pile of rice) — and not a smooth, linear expansion but something far more explosive. The rabbits begin to make sense.
In every other part of this story we need to seek out the abstraction that causes the story to make deep sense, instead of getting lost among a lot of words. Then we find the technology that brings this abstraction into contact with students.
Of course, we cannot just set aside curriculum time to tell the story of Australia and the Rabbits — or if we can, we can hardly justify doing so for all classrooms at a designated time. The larger point is to view geography as a single story woven out of mathematics, change over different time scales, interpreting visual representations of data, climate sciences, human decisions and other elements. We need not to teach in this way, and we need students to have the toolkit to understand it this way.
For this, as in other areas, we need to give teachers the responsibility of preparing students with those skills.
Grades K-2
As with other areas of technology K-2, think first about the teacher demonstrating with the technology. Sometimes the students get their hands on devices, but we should not rely on children at this age using a mouse or negotiating an interface. Our goal is for children to experience the connection between a map and the physical space it represents.
Show maps of every kind. The fundamental idea of the map has its seeds here. We often think of starting with maps of what is very familiar to children: The classroom, the schoolyard. But there is no harm in showing maps of the earth. Even young children can be fascinated by the idea of the planet, of history, of the universe.
Show children the globe, the paper map and the online map. Children of this age will no doubt want to see where they live. Paper maps tend to disappoint this way; Google Earth, with its nested levels all the way down to the trees on the playground, does not.
Children love to see shapes in geography, the way they do in clouds. Teachers should encourage this. The more formal vocabulary of geography (“peninsula”) can come after kids use their native style (“that part that looks like a finger pointing”).
As teachers explore maps, they should dramatize them in ways that will help the actual slow geography of the earth make more sense. The Hawaiian island chain really is like the earth blowing bubbles from under the water. If a part of land looks like it’s tearing away from another, maybe it really is. Travel in from the ocean as a cloud, smash up against the mountains, and rain. Then look at the green terrain you cause, you cloud you.
That said, take care in using relational language that may make the more formal language of geography more confusing later on. Example: Travel north from the U.S. to go to Canada, do not go up. The more children hear you think in these terms the more readily they will make sense of them later on.
Match maps to physical space: At this age, maps may not sense. A scene and its overhead do not correlate. This is something teachers can demonstrate. Use a familiar setting (the classroom, the playground) and manipulate its map. A teacher who experiments playfully with SketchUp, for instance, can model a scene, then create maps that students put to work. This induces them to translate between the three-dimensional model created in the computer and the three-dimensional world, with a printed map as the go-between. Here, for instance, is a three-dimensional model of a garden space created in the free software SketchUp:
This is not too removed from the garden at Chautauqua. If an enterprising volunteer or middle school class created this model, teachers could play with it on the screen while the class offers opinions. Imagine asking students to use construction paper and tape to make their own version of this model, and arrange elements to match the teacher’s work. Then imagine the students taking the paper model to the garden to work with. This establishes the connection between imaginary space and real space, with the map in between.
Look for ways for student to connect physically with maps. Imagine Google Earth projected onto a tabletop. Imagine the user can manipulate the image with simple hand gestures. If we invite students to interact with this representation of the earth this way, they gain a direct, kinetic understanding of how the earth is laid out. Even at this young age, we can ask them to fly across the Pacific (it’s the really big ocean) or find India (it points down) and so forth.
Without such a setup (which is real technology), we can still give children tools for mapping the world: a digital measurement wheel, for instance, is like a toy, but it also shows a number. (Yes, we could count the clicks as we walk — and please do — but the digital number confirms it.) Be alert to devices that ping, that echolocate, that track against GPS; use them to translate physical actions into representations of the shape and size of space.
Understand that even at this age, kids are avid about exploring the imaginary spaces inside computers. Minecraft, for example, gives children endless explorations of space, from the bird’s-eye view to deep below the ground. We may find even young children ready to manipulate space with their hands as a way of understanding it.
But what a dilemma. There is a drive to explore with great physicality: running, climbing, pushing. But Minecraft et al offer the suggestion that if children only sit still and focus their attention to the computer, they can fly, or burrow a mile deep, or reshape a landscape.
Summary: Show students paper maps and physical globes alongside digital maps and globes, so they see the connection. Explore geography; make its dynamics into a vivid story. Look for ways to students to begin to measure their world and explore it inentionally.
Grades 3–5
The concept of map must expand: in the students’ mind, in the teachers’ minds, and in the maps themselves. Digital maps can be storehouses of imagery in many forms: geotagged photos, panoramas, street explorations, links to texts. Paper maps contain multiple layers of data as well, but with digital maps the layers are more varied (videos, links) and more explicit (you can switch them on and off).
Show students how to draw information out of maps. Google Earth/Maps (the services overlap) is bursting with information, almost certainly more than children can make sense of at this age. So the teacher needs to model making sense of these layers of information. Begin by drawing inferences from the satellite imagery. Zoom to an area and examine what we learn from photographs.
Consider this view of Sapporo, Japan and its surroundings:
First, we have the city, the farmlands, and the forested terrain. There is about four times as much farmlands as city; is that a pattern everywhere? The photos in the strip below are all from the area shown on the map (hovering over them shows exactly where). What do we learn? We see a very orderly, traditional style of old building and landscape; we even see the same symmetry in several images in a row. Then there is this showstopper:
That is the Mount Okura Ski Jump Stadium. Just this one image teaches us about the climate, culture and economy of Sapporo, if we only ask the right questions of it. Conducting similar explorations around the world will help students understand how to piece together meaningful information from digital maps. That said, without a teacher’s directives the students are likely only to confuse themselves with boundless imagery.
Add time as a map dimension. Change over time is exactly the sort of abstraction students might not acquire on their own. How do we see change, as clearly as we can see area or shape? Technology allows us to extend our perceptions across time.
Getting time in hand makes other abstractions more accessible. Students often struggle with counties vs. states vs. nations. Watch this:
Consider watching this a few times with students, then asking them to draw a flip book of U.S. history — or at least an approximation. (Be kind and give them a U.S. map to begin with.)
At this age, leave the time intact. That is, don’t compress time into a single image. Leave that for later. The simple contribution of technology, in this case, is in letting change over time play out over time instead of on a static image.
Teach students to explore digital maps and stay oriented. When students of this age explore, say, Google Earth, they are at constant risk of losing their understanding of where they are exploring. Navigating cardinal directions and staying within a region or locale requires practice. Think of all the ways you keep yourself oriented while exploring at different scale and give students the chance to practice those methods. Include a basic understanding of the continents and prominent features students can use as signposts (Florida is a handle for the U.S., for example).
Ask students to capture stories and ideas as maps. Consider this annotated image, created on a service known as “ThingLink.” In case history passes over this artifact, we have a hand-drawn map of the U.S. in five regions, assembled as a jigsaw puzzle. Each section is tagged with a video of students’ voices, hands and drawings talking about the region. The final digital product is high-tech; the voices, hands, and drawings are not. As consumers of maps, students need to learn to interpret satellite imagery and data overlays. As creators of maps, we should root the experience of mapping in a direct, hands-on, collaborative experiences.
And please let us not neglect the maps that do not tell realistic stories, but instead depict the wishes, fears, joys and imaginations of children. Again, remember that the gridded world of Minecraft is self-expressive for children; they play, create, dream, destroy and build within it, and feel deep attachments to the worlds they shape through it. We may not use Minecraft in the classroom (kettle of worms), but at least be alert to technological means of amplifying children’s spatial imaginations in the same way.
Summary: Teach students to collect multimedia information from online maps. Add time as a dimension to maps. Ask student to create maps that tells stories, including stories they imagine.
Grades 6–8
Stake out the extremes. If we follow a framework laid out by writer Kieran Egan, this is an age of fascination with extremes, an age for which the Guinness Book of Records is a bible: tallest, coldest, longest-lived, strongest. Try to picture an expanding mind finding the limits of its imagination, and organizing the world according to the limits it finds. We should supply students with subjects to consider: the deepest mines; the most remote places; the largest megacities; the strangest, most difficult challenges humans endure. Unlike the Guinness Book’s era of supremacy, this is a time in which students can experience extremes almost directly: taking a virtual stroll along the Giant’s Causeway, or dive to the bottom of Dean’s Blue Hole, or take a Google Street View tour of Base Camp at Mt. Everest.
Make maps starting points for research. Continue asking students to browse deep into resources like Google Earth, with it many layers of imagery and data. Now instead of interpreting imagery on its face, we can teach students to interrogate what they find by searching databases and news sources to fill out a portrait of the features they discovered. We can begin to expect students to sort information into what is important. I recall a 3rd grader identifying the local post office as the most notable place in a Japanese city, because it was the first thing she clicked on. Middle schools students can learn to differentiate.
The drive to discover extremes, mentioned above, gives students a mode of organization: the post office is not the most extreme anything, but Mt. Fuji may be. Researching along extremes can also lead to broader subjects. The Giant’s Causeway, for instance, is simply a dramatic example of geological processes found elsewhere. Dean’s Blue Hole is the subject of local mythologies; what other geographic features have turned up as terrible figures in world mythologies?
Teach students to actively negotiate between static images and visualizations. Remember the video of the U.S. extending across the continent? Now the students are ready for this:
Can you imagine the confusion induced by showing this image without careful explanation? The brown area is the oldest, then the white area, then the green…why would we expect students to be able to intuit what is going on here? Yet this is a valuable image. Not only do the regions of color correspond to time, they also correspond to historical actions: purchases, wars, compromises. So: show the video above, then assign the major “explosions” in the video to groups. Expect them to leap up, yell “freeze” at their moment, and explain what their explosion represents. Now this single still images synthesizes the physical time of the animated map and the social interactions of groups “popping up” with their stories.
Now consider:
This image represents one of the most jarring scientific insights of the 20th century: the earth is youngest along lines that extend in irregular lengths across the ocean floor. Prior to the ocean mapping that was a by-product of World War II, the sea floor was thought to be featureless. (Chapter 12 of Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything tells this story vividly.) At this point, we may want technology to take up the story, but in fact just this image holds more information than scientists had when they first surmised the fact of plate tectonics. So linger here, and ask students to extract everything they can. In fact, the purest contribution of technology may just be the ability to zoom in. For instance, let one student tell this story:
While another tells this one:
Now we can turn students loose on this collection of animations related to plate tectonics. Let them match the animations to the story implied by the static image.
Notice how we constantly broker an exchange of understanding between static and dynamic maps. If you give students a simulation or animation, also give them a static representation of the same thing. If no static version exists, expect the students to create their own. We should do the same for maps explaining social sciences (historical, social or economic data), and physical sciences (climate, geology, life sciences).
Summary: Teach to extremes, and use them to organize students’ research through maps. Use visualizations to help students interpret static maps that comprise many kinds of data.
Grades 9–12
As with so many subjects, we transition from using tools to thinking about their use.
Look at maps critically. Let’s take one of the famous examples of cartography, mapping social data against geography:
The more a curious thinker looks at this map, the more thrilling and strange it is. We see the overlapping influences of race, stresses, unemployment and affluences in single faces we can read in an unconscious instant. These are Chernoff faces, and cartographers love and hate them. We can assign students to read this blog post arguing against Chernoff faces, or at least against taking them at (pun intended) face value. Now we have introduced our students to the idea of thinking critically about maps. A similar set of long-standing concerns about the Mercator projection (remember how scary that giant Russia looked?) takes us into an intersection between mathematics and history.
Where does technology enter into this? In two ways. Firstly, maps are everywhere: In news broadcasts, in YouTube videos, in Senate proceedings. Videos are primary sources; so is the underlying data. For example, this map from a television commercial got Verizon sued by AT&T:
The map seems to imply that AT&T has no coverage for the vast majority of the nation. But compare to the distribution of population in the United States:
AT&T has no 3G where the people aren’t. So: Is this deceptive? (The lawsuit’s outcome was ambiguous.) Once they’ve been engaged in such debates, students can look for potentially deceptive maps of their own: In politics, for instance.
The second way to add critical thinking to maps is to have students make them, and think critically as they do so. Assign them to make a map that deceives without lying outright. Or assign them to show the same with different representations. For instance, here is a map, made in a few minutes on the outstanding site SocialExplorer, showing where the foreign-born non-citizens live in the US:
Here is the same data represented differently:
The difference? Color, and the number of people represented by a one-inch circle (63,000 in the first vs. 2.5 million in the second). Lastly there is a different measure, the foreign-born, non-naturalized-citizen population per 1,000 per county:
Which view is “correct”? Of course there is no single answer. Only by tinkering with data representations on their own can students gain a feel for how maps finagle data, and human emotions. Fortunately, technology lets us play at will.
Invite students to travel. High school students begin to feel ready to move outward, to exercise their autonomy and to find their place in the world. If, at this age, we ask students to create realistic itineraries of travel, with well-researched details and spreadsheets tracking logistics, we may be connecting to something very real and possible. We may find that students who can organize and budget for imaginary travel can just as well organize a service-oriented trip with classmates. Of course, the fact of folding many skills into a single outcome is a good thing as well.
Expect students to create representations of physical space. We could keep saying “maps,” but there is more than just maps at issue. Think, for instance, about SketchUp, a reasonably powerful 3d modeling tool that is not only free but also interacts well with Google Earth. At this point, do not think of a map as something you find or acquire; think of it as something you create interactively. We should center on a few common tools for generating maps from online data sources.
Look all the way back to K-2 and recall our emphasis on kinesthetic mapping: Rolling measuring wheels, stretching tapes, counting steps. At the further end of the spectrum, those with programming skills can manipulate freely available earth data into visualizations of their own.
Summary: Expect students to be able to generate maps from online data sources, and think critically about the representations they make. Invite students to plan itineraries and realistic explorations of the world.
Resources
A collection of teaching geoscience with visualizations from the National Association of Geoscience Teachers
ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World
Games and Simulations from the National Center for Atmospheric Research
Science Education Research portal for K-12 teachers