Thursday, May 28, 2015

Mapping activity with middle school students


This (very cold and snowy) winter I worked with a local middle school on indoor mapping activities. To teach them the components of a map and the conundrums of trying to represent a real world surface on a piece of paper, students mapped a fictitious island in a video game. Wii has a Resorts dvd that features an island where all its various sports activities take place. Studentswere able to fly around the island to identify the details of island shape, land cover, and scale. The students also had to figure out a way to represent the vertical relief on the island since a very large volcano is a prominent landform. A couple of their maps shown below can be enlarged if you click on them.