How it all began....

In July at a summer business meeting of Women in GIS, we decided to take on GIS Day 2000 as a project.  Our initial plan was to build on school presentations that we’d done sporadically over the last year, including GIS Day 1999 and a couple of career days.   We wanted to put together a presentation that was interactive, fun for the students and required minimal preparation on the part of the individual presenters.

Over the next 2 months, a PowerPoint presentation and ArcView project took shape.  The PowerPoint guides the presenter through a general discussion of GIS and how it is used today. The ArcView project included 2 views.  “Where’s your school from the Oregon Zoo?” looked at local data around a particular school where the presentation was taking place and helped the students think about spatial relationships and distances. From there we talked about the park the zoo was in and how that was near another famous park in Portland, Forest Park. Students were given maps of Forest Park to study and help them with the next activity, “Let’s plan a park like Forest Park.” 

While the presentation was still coming together, some of us were concentrating on how to encourage students’ participation (prizes). This became one element of the “presenter packet” that would come to include a CD of the presentation materials, maps of Forest Park, ESRI’s GIS Day 2000 word search/coloring page for each student, photocopies of articles on how GIS was used to map the Olympic torch route through Australia and about Lewis and Clark maps on the web, an ArcVoyager CD, feedback forms for both the presenter and the teacher, and a large orthophoto plotted for the area around the school.  (These were a huge hit in the classrooms!) Some schools also received additional posters/maps that were donated or produced by the individual presenters.