I spent last week at the annual conference of the State Educational Technology Directors Association. Participants and speakers talked about STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) to the point that I wished I had a nickel for every time it was mentioned. STEM content is indeed key to the future of our nation and planet, and I’ll be heading to a STEM conference in Virginia in a week. I just wish it were a little easier for people to see what, to me, shines like a supernova — that “GIS = STEM.”
Educational challenges today include contextualizing content, chunking information, scaffolding skills, and doing it for more kids, with fewer resources, against a backdrop of increasing distractions. How do we help students understand fundamental tools of math, the power of models for planning, the complex interrelationships in the world, the world of data from the world AS data, and the myriad other concerns we have for youth heading toward a future filled with challenges?
Integrate real-world content about issues local to global, requiring accumulation of background information and analysis of data, to reach a conclusion. Attack an ill-structured problem by laying out significant elements, exploring the characteristics, seeking the relationships, and modeling solutions, to solve a problem. GIS is a perfect tool for doing that. But using any “powertool” takes practice. “Starting small” is a good idea.
It can begin easily, even at a young age, if approached sensibly. Most folks would not recommend “War and Peace” as the best primer for early readers. Young minds should begin exploring problems and analyzing data with appropriately-sized tasks. Where are the ant colonies most dense on the playground, and why? Is there a relationship between tree health and proximity to roads in our community? I wish I had a nickel for every educator who said they wanted to do GIS so they can have their students model the complex relationships between global politics, economic production, energy consumption, climate systems, population, and food production, in order to figure out how to deal with climate change. Many seem surprised when I suggest it will take them more than an afternoon to get comfy with tech tools, reams of data, analytical processes, and the background content from multiple disciplines needed to address this.
If we truly want youth to develop STEM capacity, they should begin at an early age, integrating and analyzing data from diverse fields and using the power of the computer to expose relationships. Track butterflies, map the local watershed, analyze the location of a midfielder through a soccer game. There are countless STEM-related topics for which GIS should be the “powertool” of choice.
- Charlie Fitzpatrick, ESRI Education Programs
