Travels in time and space
August 2007
Kim Thomas
Gerard O’Sullivan is a teacher with a mission. In primary schools, geography is still too often taught with worksheets: his aim is to show teachers how the use of a geographical information system (GIS) can stimulate the natural curiosity of children in their local environment. For more than two years, Gerard, an advanced skills teacher at Homewood School in Kent, has been a participant in the Dakini Project, a scheme devised by academics at Canterbury Christ Church University to introduce school students and teachers to the potential of GIS.
GIS is a way of capturing, storing and analysing digital data relating to the physical environment. By combining data from different sources, you gain new insights: you might, for example, overlay census data onto a regional map to show the geographical variation in educational achievement; or overlay an historical map onto a current map to see how a particular landscape has been affected by development. “GIS is used in pretty much every industry you can think of,” says Jason Sawle, Dakini’s project manager. “You switch a light on, and managing that process somewhere is a GIS system. Your rubbish is picked up using GIS. It’s a
Jason and his colleague Richard Pole launched Dakini in 2003, when they realised that, despite its pervasiveness, GIS is almost unknown in schools. Run jointly by the Canterbury Christ Church team and the Académie de Rouen in France, Dakini has received £3.4m worth of funding from Interreg IIIa, the European Regional Development Fund Programme.
Digital Worlds, the software developed by Dakini, has been designed specifically for schoolchildren. It comes with a wide variety of data including historic maps, aerial photography, Ordnance Survey maps, Environment Agency data and 2001 census information. The software was made freely available to schools in Kent, East Sussex, Brighton and Hove as well as to schools in the coastal regions of northern France. Free training and support were also included.
When Gerard received his copy of Digital Worlds, he immediately saw the potential it offered, both for his own secondary school pupils and for pupils in the local primary schools he visits once a week. One of its main uses has been to help younger children understand how their local landscape has changed over time. “I always introduce myself as Doctor Who, and I tell them they’re going to be taken into the time machine to find out how their village has changed,” says Gerard. “We start off in 2007 in their local village with real maps, and they have to write a newspaper article from 2007 about their village. Then we go into the time machine, which is always the computer room, where Dakini is set up, and they’re then taken back in time to look at their village a century ago. And they have to write the same sort of story set 100 years ago.”
By comparing the current map of their local area with historical maps, children begin to understand, he says, that maps are just “snapshots in time”: in one village school, some children found that the land they now lived on was once a rectory; others found that their houses stood on the site of a lunatic asylum.
On another occasion, Gerard took a group of students to Ramsgate for a project he called ‘Sherlock Holmes and the Mystery of the Disappearing Railway Station’. Students hunted for clues to the whereabouts of the town’s old train station, but couldn’t find the station itself. Then they returned to school, where they looked at the aerial photographs on the
Because GIS uses data relating to space and distance, it’s a good way of learning mathematical concepts, says Jason: “We say, ‘Here are your local maps – how far do you think you live from school in metres?’ That starts a discussion with kids. ‘Look at scale – what’s the average length of a car? How many car lengths do you live away, how many netball pitches?’ Then you can actually use the software to measure how far away you live. You can collect that information as a group and then put it into Excel. You’re doing graphs, spreadsheets, scale, estimation, and if we take some elevation data we can do some very nice trigonometry.”
Gerard believes the software is versatile enough to used by pupils as young as 5 and as old as 18. He has worked with A-level students to overlay census data onto a map of Bristol: “There are a number of data points in Bristol that measure, in areas smaller than a ward, factors such as median income, infant mortality rates and educational attainment. And if you start plotting things like this you find there’s a close link in cities between infant mortality rate and life expectancy and the median income level of the ward.”
He hopes to equip the parents of a group of reception children with
The British side of the Dakini project is scheduled to finish in November this year; the French side will finish six months later. That is unlikely to be the end of the story, however. From 2009, GIS will be part of the geography National Curriculum for 11-18 year-olds, so the team plan to apply for the next round of Interreg funding, with the aim of making Dakini more widely available. Interest in the project from the large GIS company ESRI has resulted in the release of Digital Worlds 2, which is based on ESRI software.
Gerard is full of ideas about expanding the use of GIS, and is keen to develop the work he has already done with his French counterparts. Jason sees plenty of uses for GIS in the new geography curriculum, including teaching about climate change: by working out how much petrol they use on their journey to school, children could calculate the CO2 burden of travelling to school for their whole class. Imaginative teachers can find applications for GIS right across the curriculum: Dakini, it seems, could be the start of something very much bigger.