Color Your World (CYW), a game-like module, introduces students to geographic data and the geographic information system, ArcView 2 which is a commercially available GIS produced by ESRI. CYW is the introductory module f or the series which also includes Light Up Your Nation and Know Your Neighborhood.
CYW uses ArcView 2 sample data and additional thematic data sets to demonstrate the ability of ArcView 2 to integrate cartographic data, tabular records, and images. It leads the player through a series of rounds that test knowledge of country names, loc ation, and thematic attributes. Players are asked to identify a countries based on clues and determine the theme of a series of thematic maps. A final score and achievement classification, helps the player gauge their knowledge.
Know Your Neighborhood (still under development) uses ArcView 2 in an exploration of 1990 Census data. This module is designed to be used with the Census data set packaged by Wessex, Inc. It also makes extensive use of a hypertext help system both as a tutorial and as a means of interfacing with ArcView. The goal was for students to interact with a dataset that was both immediately meaningful ("that's my street!") and modifiable so that students would own the data. The module begins with a global view of the Earth and a demonstration of the latitude/longitude coordinate system. To give students a sense of scale differences, they zoom in from a view of the Earth to a view of Washington, DC. The capital is used as an example for locating map informati on, geocoding, and exploring census data through prepared thematic maps. Students are then led through the process of extracting census data for their own neighborhoods from the Wessex CD-ROMs. With the skills gained by practice on the map of Washington , they are encouraged to add information to a street map of their neighborhood, locate addresses, and perform simple analyses
Light up Your Nation takes advantage of ArcView 2's ability to display both raster and vector data as an aid to student exploration of nighttime Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) imagery and ArcView ArcUSA sample da ta. The module leads the student on an investigation of the reasons for light patterns on DMSP images of various regions of the world, then focuses on a comparison of US nighttime imagery and US population. Students use the software to zoom in to their home area and investigate its characteristics, especially the correlation of the DMSP imagery with the population distribution.