GISCorps Volunteer teaching Spatial Thinking/GIS to College students

Recently, one of our volunteers, Javier Aguilar, self-designed a volunteer project. He had previously volunteered for a K-12 project in 2013. The following report describes his new project.

¡¡Viva la mujer!! Our two full day course on Spatial Thinking and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) graduated 28 women and 9 men from the Claremont Colleges: Claremont McKenna College, Harvey Mudd College, Pitzer College, Pomona College, Scripps College, Claremont Graduate University (CGU), and Keck Graduate Institute (KGI). The goal of this free training was to help increase representation in GIS and urban and regional planning in Southern California, through the exposure of the GIS technology and planning techniques. It focused outreach to students of color, first generation college students, women, and those from the LBGTQ community.  The two-day GIS training was materialized through a partnership with the Claremont Chicano Latino Student Affairs (CLSA), the Claremont Colleges Library, and URISA’s GISCorps. 

Through the support of Assistant Dean Xochitl Casillas and Administrative/Event Coordinator Miriam Escobedo from CSLA, we reached out to students from the Office of Black Student Affairs, 7C Asian American Advisory Board, Intercollegiate Feminist Center, Queer Resource Center, and CSLA.  From the Claremont Colleges Jeanine Finn and Stacy Martinez provided 27 laptops configured with ArcGIS Pro 3.0 and Microsoft 365, as well as a conference with computer projectors and white boards. 

From GISCorps, Javier Aguilar created the PowerPoints, GIS guidebooks, and other related materials, as well as provided the class instruction in two separate sessions: Session 1: Friday, January 20th and Saturday, January 21st from 9:00am-4:00pm and Session 2: Friday, February 3rd and Saturday, February 4th from 9:00am-4:00pm.  The first training session had 12 students and second 25 students.  They were freshmen to third year doctoral students in the fields of biology, computer science, environmental sciences, public health, political sciences, economics, linguistics, engineering, and other disciplines.  At the training, students learned about the geographic approach, basic planning concepts, and several GIS techniques.

On the first day, the training covered GIS concepts and ArcGIS Pro basics including basics attribute and location queries which progressed to a simple imminent domain analysis using ArcGIS Pro and MS Excel pivot tables.  Students were also taught cartographic design principles and created a project area map from a blank sheet.  Hence, they brought in several layers into their GIS projects to symbolize, joined tables, geocode a location, and create a buffer for the area of interest. These maps were laid out to an 8 1/2” by 11” page with the essential map elements and exported it to a pdf format.  Finally, the students used these concepts to automate ninety-three maps of a different location that they also exported to a pdf.

On the second day of training, students geocoded a csv file of crime data and created a simple web map while learning about map projections.  Next, they created address locators for Los Angeles County to address match all the county’s public schools (over 3,000 records) and configured a simple application to view the schools in both a computer and mobile phone.  During the afternoon session, students symbolized categorical and numeric data.  For the latter, they learned the concepts of data normalizations and experimented with different data classification methods.  Lastly, the students were taught different geoprocessing methods to site senior centers based on zoning data, demographic data, parcel data, and existing senior center data. 

In sum, the students were taught and exposed to many concepts and techniques that are aimed to inspire them into the fields of GIS and planning with the end goal of helping bring more diversity into these professions.  For the next steps, we are reaching out to five local jurisdictions for internships.  These jurisdictions may have internship opportunities in the departments of planning, IT, public works, public health, bureau of engineering, and others.  In addition, we are also reaching out to the California Geographic Information Association and the California American Planning Association Foundation for potential partnerships on these efforts.         

 Project Complete.