National Geographic Interactive Map

Title:
 MapMaker Interactive.

Publisher:
 National Geographic.

Subject Area:
Social Studies.

Summary: MapMaker is, as the name indicates, an interactive mapmaker based on information by the National Geographic. You can situate yourself anywhere on Earth, zoom in to look at individual countries or zoom out to have a continent in your map window. You can also full size the map window to have a larger canvas to work on.

Ease of Use: The tools on the website are easy to use, but as mentioned in the Skill Set section you will have to know the terminology for it to be effective. A student will have to have minimal skills of drag-and-drop as well as free-form drawing with a cursor.

There is a static image tutorial but it’s easily missed as the icon is very small (although situated in the top, right corner where I would usually go look for Help). There is no feedback on the content you put in, as it is a mapmaking tool and the content is therefore up to the user. The tool gives you a label when you hover over an icon, as well as on the map when you’re trying to put something on it or move things (“Click and Drag on a marker if you want to move it”)

Skill Set: The MapMaker is available under the Teacher-tab on the National Geographic’s website. For the web to be useful you will have to have a substantial prior knowledge in the terminology of social studies, mostly geography and maps, but also culture and economy.

Therefore the targeted audience would be for students over 10 years of age, in social science classes, but there is really no age limit as the user can make any kind of maps they like, with the content they want. As long as the instructor explains what they can do with the map (and maybe sticks to one or two tabs of icons) the students could possibly be younger than 10.

Program Design Features: Simple “yes or no” answers”

Control of Pace
- Yes

Reviews/Help
- Yes

Ability to Backtrack
- Yes

Levels of Difficulty
- Yes/No (it goes with the content)

Physical Interface
- No

Speech Features
- No

Childproof - Yes

Individual Use
- Yes

Use with Pairs/Small Groups
- Yes

Printer Use
- Yes

Test/Recordkeeping/Game Save feature – Yes (you can download a map you’re working on and then open it again through the website)

Add-on Option-Can incorporate user content - Yes

Scaffolding - No

Program Comments: The MapMaker is a tool that’s used by teachers that want to have their students work with an interactive map. The objective is to get students to think off maps as something you can work with, change and explore, not as fixed entities that they have no control over. It is very detailed and based on a lot of data about the planet, from satellite pictures to information about the sea, terrain and nations.

Problem Solving Skills: This software has many elements of
problem solving and they are limited only by the activity the teacher assigns. These are the problem solving skills that I could identify by using the tool only:

• Multiple solutions- Multiple strategies
• Identifying relationships
• Gathering information- discerning what is important information
• Filtering and assigning relevance to data and information
• Organizing information
• Interpreting data
• Scanning for clues
• Stimulate imaginative thinking
• Ability to explore
• Identification of patterns and sequence
• Synthesize into graphic representation of a concept-visualizing data

   

Fun Factor: As with so many other open-ended tools it depends on the assignment and understanding how enjoyable the tool is and how long students will last. I believe that the tool has many possibilities in the classroom.

Supplementary Materials: There are several supplemental links on the National Geographic website along with the interactive map. One is the MapMaking kit where you can print out maps in A4 standard paper size to be put on the floor or the wall. Other is a list of activities you can use in the classroom. The activities already have a description, links to the maps needed along with basic information a teacher must have for a successful activity. One of those activities is the Geography of a Pencil.

Activity:

There are many activities that can use an open-ended tool like the interactive MapMaker. The following example describes a social studies class in Iceland where one of the subjects is to learn about the people that emigrated from Iceland to Canada at the end of the 19^th century. This activity is supposed to be done before the students work on an interactive map about the journey from Iceland to Canada.

Time: 3x 40 minutes (can be longer if the teacher wants them to expand the activity to a written assignment as well).

Age: 13-14 year olds.

Goal: Students put themselves in the position of people that had to make a decision to leave their home for an unknown future.

Material needed: Newspapers, a couple of green, blue and brown cloths, and construction paper in different Earth colors.

Backstory:

Famine resulting from hard winters and volcano eruptions, along with land being sparse, made many people think about a better life in another country. It’s estimated that about 14.000 Icelandic people (25% of the nation at that time) immigrated to Canada between 1870 and 1914. Families had to make a decision to stay or leave for the unknown, knowing that they might never come back and some might die on the way.

Activity:

The students put themselves in the position of families that all live in the same fjord on the North East coast of Iceland (3-4 students in each family). They start by crushing all the newspapers into a pile that looks like a U, placing the green and brown cloths over it and the blue ones in the middle. This will be their fjord.

The students group themselves into families (or the teacher does it), naming their character and deciding what occupation they have. The family can have more family members than the number of students in each group. Usually one of the families will be the owner of all the land in the fjord, making the other families their tenants. That does not mean that life isn’t hard for them.

Using the cardboard paper the students make houses, animals, boats and their families. This is not supposed to be very detailed and it’s actually enough for the students to bend a piece of paper in half to represent a house (that stands like an A). Students can represent people and animals by ripping little pieces of paper and placing them by the house.

After the “stage” is set the students tell the class about their families. They learn that a ship is leaving in the summer for Canada and are given the options of staying or going, having the possibility of leaving some family members behind. After each family has reached a decision they have to explain their reasoning to the class. In some cases a family member might stay behind, e.g. younger children and elderly people being placed in the care of other families in the fjord.

When every group has gotten a chance to explain their rational they get to throw a dice. If the dice shows the numbers 1-4 their character makes it safely across the Atlantic, but if they get a 5 or a 6 they either die on the way or soon after arriving to Canada.

Developing a Fraction Prototype

Ohh...the wonderful world of fractions. This three week assignments has been a bit of a roller coaster. But that's what design is. You get an idea, it doesn't actually work (or you can not come to conclusion) so you change it. Then you prototype it and the ride just keeps repeating itself.

The assignment was to come up with an idea for a game/simulation that teaches fractions. The only guideline we got was that it couldn't use the old ' pizza slices' method. Ideally it was also suppose to link to the real life use of fractions.

We decided to teach fractions through music - or music through fractions, depending on how you look at it. Our initial idea was to use a Makey Makey tool kit and link that somehow to water glasses. The glasses would be filled with different amount of water (that's where the fractions were to come in) and if you got them right you could play a song, that had been assigned to you, through a digital environment.

We probably should have thought a little bit about the water and the electronics. But we were so focused on having it in the physical world as well as the digital that we tried again, and again.

What we ended up with is far from perfect. We saw that clearly in the physical prototyping class, where we were all still on a different page as to what the game play actually was. But it was fun and again, it's what design is all about. It's messy, but so worth it because there's a chance you might end up with something brilliant. And if not, then you hopefully learned why it didn't work and you move on to the next thing where that knowledge hopefully comes in handy.