Digital Geography

Here’s an outline of a primary transition project that I’ve been delivering recently. The project was planned and delivered with the aid of several of my finest Year 7 students! I wrote it very quickly, in reponse to a colleague’s request, so there will be a few spellling mistakes etc.

The objective of the 2 1/2 hour lesson was to address the question  “Where am I?” Drawing on elements of History ICT and Geography, the lesson aimed to provide an enjoyable and instructive experience, that would allow the Year 6 students to improve their spatial knowledge and understanding.

After an introduction consisting of a “get to know you” game involving an inflatable globe, the students were introduced to the concept of latitude and longitude. Google Earth was used to teach the basics. Hint – to display the grid as shown in the screenshot below select View and Grid:

To help the students remember the difference, we played the “Latitude Longitude Gratitude Attitude” game first invented by my former colleague Tim Bown. It’s a version of Simon Says but with a “do as I say not as I do” twist – and special actions of course.

Next, the students were invited to say how they thought that latitude could be worked out in the event that they had been kidnapped, blindfolded and taken far from their current location. Lots of excellent answers were given, ranging from observations of the weather, animals and plants, height of the sun, length of the day etc.

To consider the problems of measuring longitude, the students were subjected to a dramatic interpretation of the foundering of the English fleet under Admiral Clowdisley in 1707. The story comes from the book Longitude by Dava Sobel and was presented with a PowerPoint and plenty of sound effects. The upshot of this , and the countless other maritime disasters, was the passing of the Longitude Act in 1714. At this point the students were invited to consider how longitude might be established.

To explain the relationship between time and longitude I used Earth Browser on my interactive whiteboard (it rotates better than the Google Earth globe) I shone a torch at the globe to represent the sun and to make the point that 12.00 midday is the time when the sun is at it’s zenith. Watching the rotating globe meant that students were able to infer the reasons why clocks in the US are behind those in the UK. A quick bit of mental maths revealed that the earth rotates 15 degrees every hour and the class was then able to understand that the calculation of longitude is simple, providing one knows the local time, and time at another location, for example Greenwich in London.

Following the historical part of the lesson, students were introduced to Google Earth and the Space Navigator. I have a class set of these devices, kindly donated by 3d Connexion. The answer to the question “where am I” had to be answered by using the Space Navigators to fly to the location of the school.

Space Navigators are extremely popular with students, (although some report a sense of nausea after longer periods of use!) The students were very keen on exploring other locations, particularly the 3D model of Big Ben, and because of the season, Wimbledon. I demonstrated how GPS could be used to answer the “where am I” question by plugging one of my Garmin Gekos into my laptop running Google Earth Plus and importing a waypoint marking the school. (In the past I have been able to demonstrate live tracking of a moving student, using the procedure I describe here.)

The final activity involved a geocaching adventure around the school. The Year 7 students had devised a riddle, which, when solved, revealed the location of some sweets. The riddle was broken up and hidden around the school grounds and marked with GPS waypoints.

The speed with which they solved the puzzle, after the briefest instructions, is a testament to how user friendly the Geko 201 is. I had to create a couple more challenges for them, simply done by dropping pencils around the playing fields and getting the students to discover them. To do this kind of an activity with a class requires a set of GPS units (one between two is best) a PC with Easy GPS installed, and a usb/serial interface cable. It’s also really handy to have one PC running Google Earth Plus, so that the GPS waypoints can be viewed from the classroom. Once a series of waypoints have been collected, marking for example the locations of dropped pencils, the coordinates can be easily transfered in seconds to the class set of GPS’s using Easy GPS. I also hid a student in the school gounds to play a GPS version of find and seek.

More on teaching with GPS and buying equipment here.