Volunteers help 4-H with visualization of spatial data – 2023

4‑H (Heard, Heart, Hands and Health) is America’s largest youth development organization—empowering nearly six million young people with the skills to lead for a lifetime. 4‑H is delivered by Cooperative Extension—a community of more than 100 public universities across the nation that provides experiences where young people learn by doing. For more than 100 years, 4‑H has welcomed young people of all beliefs and backgrounds, giving kids a voice to express who they are and how they make their lives and communities better. Every child has valuable strengths and real influence to improve the world.

To give a chance to high school-age students to learn about the power of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in general and map making in particular, 4-H encouraged around ten students to collect some spatial data and communicate their stories using maps. The maps were created in ArcGIS Pro and then presented at the Map Gallery at Esri User Conference in San Diego (10-14 July, 2023). 4-H needed two volunteers to demonstrate to the students best practices in creating visually pleasing maps and then to meet with the students and offer constructive feedback to their final maps for the exhibit.

GISCorps volunteers Alex K. Rouse and Vernika Monk were selected to assist the 4-H students with their mapping and geospatial data visualization tasks. Vernika and Alex presented on “What Makes a Good Map?” to the students, who then took that information and created maps based on their selected topics. The students used either ArcGIS Story Maps and/or ArcGIS Pro to create their maps. Alex and Vernika had one-on-one calls with each student to provide guidance on how to transform their Story Maps into a print poster version to be displayed at the Esri User Conference. Also, during the one-on-one calls was a demonstration of various geospatial tasks of the suggestions that were made to the students.

Project complete.