Volunteer Provides GIS Support to SystemsGo

Fredericksburg Education Initiative, Inc. dba SystemsGo (SGO) is an educational 501(c)(3) non-profit with the mission to enhance education for better workforce development, and to ignite tomorrow’s innovators. SystemsGo provides a proven 4-year aerospace engineering-based STEM curriculum to high schools in TX, NM, CO, and OK. The curriculum uses Project Based Learning, the Industry Research Design and Development (RD&D) Loop, high-powered rocketry and teamwork to develop students’ skills in STEM, creativity, innovation, critical thinking, problem solving, communication, collaboration, leadership, and perseverance. After reviewing the fundamentals of Physics and the four main energy systems, students are given a goal to design and build a rocket from scratch to one of four goals: carry one-pound payload to exactly one mile high, reach Mach 1 under 13,000ft, reach Mach 1.2 under 15,000ft with all components manufactured in-house, or carry a scientific research payload to 50,000ft. Teams are given the goal, a timeline, and a budget and expected to take responsibility and ownership for their learning and for the completion of the project. Teachers use Socratic questioning techniques to facilitate the students’ quest to solve problems. At the end of the academic year, teams bring their projects to one of five SystemsGo launch locations for an opportunity to test their rockets in real life. While the launch provides unparalleled inspiration and motivation, it more importantly provides the opportunity to test and gather data for evaluation to present a Post Mission Analysis (PMA) thereby completing the RD&D loop. 

The goal of this project was to create a GIS system that would capture data from the student’s launch event and display it to the public. The system needed to capture both the background data of the student’s launch plans so that the field teams can coordinate for the event live as well as the information captured by the field teams, like the condition of the rocket, recovery coordinates and a picture.

Olga Tambazidis, a GISCorps volunteer, completed the project in collaboration with Rebekah Hyatt from SystemsGo. They decided to utilize Esri’s Experience Builder to display and Esri’s Suvery123 to capture the live data. They also utilized a Google survey and Google sheets to capture the pre-launch data. This project aimed to be scalable from year to year. Together, they outlined the goals and desires for the Experience Builder, building on the project through weekly feedback sessions. Using ArcGIS Online Survey123 (Figure 1) and Experience Builder (Figure 2), Olga created a system that captures launch data, links it to Google Survey data loaded in AGOL, and displays it on the Experience Builder in real time. 

Using Google Survey (Figure 3), Olga built a survey with data type guidelines — including whole-number enforcement for altitude, decimal support for diameter and weight, wind speed classifications based on NWS categories, and restricted special characters — to streamline updates into the AGOL dataset. Field teams used these two surveys to standardize and capture data across all launch rockets, spanning multiple Texas regions and launch dates in April 2026. 

Olga developed and refined key features throughout the project, including pop-up formatting, mission goal classifications (1lb/1mi, Mach 1.0, Mach 1.2), award formulas, and stability margin calculations. The Experience Builder was configured with filtering by school, wind direction, and motor designation, and was made publicly accessible without requiring a login — including optimizations for phone-friendly viewing. 

Through trial and error, Olga and Rebekah tested the field app and its connection to the Experience Builder to ensure a smooth launch season. Finally, Olga created documentation and a workflow to correct and include any launch information not fully captured during launch days, along with how-to guides to support future users updating dates and filters year over year.

Project Complete