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Celebrating the end of the semester remotely
By: Megan Danielson
In late January, we delivered an 8-week ‘Introduction to Web Mapping’ course at the University of San Francisco. Two weeks after our students presented their final projects, universities all over the country began canceling in-person instruction and rapidly adapting to e-learning environments in response to the COVID-19 outbreak.
Despite all of the major disruptions, students and teachers continued to push forward and inspire. We are in awe of the education community’s ability to continue to persevere and apply their passion and curiosity to geographic problems. To celebrate the end of this monumental semester, we wanted to share some projects from students and educators that have inspired us:
University of San Francisco: Monitoring homelessness in San Francisco
As part of the Introduction to Web Mapping with Mapbox course taught at USF, Dash Murawski and Matt Fernandez developed a web map to highlight the issue of homelessness in San Francisco. The map displays the location of encampments throughout 2019 and provides information on the most immediately accessible services for both social workers and unhoused individuals.
For someone that had absolutely no experience with coding going into this project, it was rather intimidating. However, the Mapbox API is relatively intuitive and easy to pick up. Coding is tough, but the Mapbox API and the class gave us the necessary tools to push forward and create what we did in the end.
— Dash Murawski, University of San Francisco
American University: Beneath the Waves
Students from American University teamed up with the Mapbox to develop projects for a few of our Community partners including Beneath the Waves and Splash.
Alexis Godwin and Felix Doll worked remotely using GitHub and Slack to continually communicate about their project for Beneath the Waves. Beneath the Waves is an ocean conservation nonprofit that is focused on rehabilitating and conserving shark populations. A large portion of their work involves tagging sharks with electronic tags and sensors. The goal of this project was to develop an interactive map that shows the movements of sharks that currently have electronic tags.
We had never used Mapbox in any capacity prior to this project but found both the Gl JS library itself and its corresponding documentation to be fairly easy to use. With GL JS we were able to create a map where users can filter by species, learn details about a shark, and highlight specific tracking points.
— Alexis Godwin & Flex Doll
Carnegie Mellon University: COVID-19 and Unemployment in PA
Professor Chris Goranson along with a group of students including Jared Kohler developed a COVID-19 dashboard to analyze the effects of job closures in Pennsylvania. The application aimed to help government officials understand how blanket business closures could impact different segments of the population.
Mapbox tools have been helpful particularly because of their relative ease of creating visual interactivity. I love the customizable vector base layers and the ability to add my content wherever I desire in the layer stack.
— Jared Kohler, Carnegie Mellon University
Clark University: Web mapping resources
Professor Shadrock Roberts and student Priyanka Verma have developed a series of online web mapping course materials. The materials, which are hosted on GitHub, are open source and contain 4–5 weeks worth of labs and lessons to help introduce students to web mapping and building basic web pages. You can find the course materials here. The Mapbox tutorial materials used to develop this course include Sheet Mapper, Analyze with Turf.js and Mapbox GL JS, and Make a Choropleth Map.
My students loved working with Mapbox Studio and learning about Mapbox services: not only is it cutting edge mapping technology that will help them professionally, but the online tutorials and documentation were a huge help in designing lab activities and assignments for them to quickly begin making beautiful maps.
— Shadrock Roberts, Clark University
Texas Christian University: Immigrant America
Five years after publishing the first version of his ‘Immigrant America’ project, Texas Christian University professor Kyle Walker has updated the map with the latest American Community Survey data and was built in part with his mapboxapi R package. You can check out the project here.
In my teaching, Mapbox Studio is an excellent way to introduce geography students to web development concepts that will likely be useful to them professionally. The interactivity of Mapbox Studio is familiar to students coming from a GIS background. They can then plug their Studio styles into HTML templates for Mapbox GL JS and start the process of learning how to present and publish their creations on a website, even if they don’t have prior experience with web development.
— Kyle Walker, Texas Christian University
Want to bring Mapbox to your classroom this fall?
Education is going to look different this fall as universities tackle bringing students and teachers together in a safe environment. We’re currently developing materials to support the transition back to the classroom and want to extend our support to educators, students, and researchers by offering to help develop curriculum and by providing remote guest lectures and direct mentorship.
If you are interested in teaching Mapbox, having us virtually visit your classroom, or are interested in exploring research opportunities, reach out to the team here.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/megan-danielson-61404840
Education interrupted was originally published in maps for developers on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
This information was first published on https://blog.mapbox.com/education-interrupted-16f98062064c?source=rss—-c5e029442—4
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