Hugo Estrada's House of Wonder

This was a comment to @geobabbler 's entry on GIS for Kids

I have been thinking about teaching the children of Crunchy Granola Academy more about GIS, and I was also thinking about having some GIS activities for my daughter's Brownie meeting.

Here is the comment that I wrote on the site:

We should exchange some ideas.

You probably want to move from the concrete physical to physical maps and then into gis. And if possible, being physically present in the grounds of the place where they are mapping would be good to help the kids make the mental leap that gis translates into the real world.

I have done walking papers with my children, and that is something that they really enjoyed. It is Concrete, they have a physical map, and they get to walk around some area.

I also have had my kids in the OSM parties. In one we got the hike Rock Creek Park and in another we hiked the zoo.

I would say that the gps unit is not really that interesting to them because it doesn’t seem to do much except to show a tiny map.

However, they did like entering notes for different points on the way in a notebook.

A possible activity that you can have for them, although this will take a little bit of planning is to create a short orienteering course. We could skip the compass if that is a problem and the area is small enough, the most important thing would be to use a map to find different points in a playground or a room.

Another activity, if these are taking place at a school, would be to map their classroom, first creating maps, and then adding points of interest, then adding demographic data, such as how many children are in different parts of the classroom.

If this could then be translated into software, then the basic concepts should be understood when you move into mapping a school grounds or some local park or area.

I will have to look at Portable GIS to see if I think my kids could handle it.

I will probably cross post this comment as an entry in my website.