1. My World GIS: A Geographic Information System for Inquiry-Based Learning
Daniel C. Edelson
Geographic Data in Education (GEODE) Initiative
Northwestern University

2. Motivation
GIS has been recognized for more than a decade as a powerful technology to support inquiry-based learning in
Geosciences
Geography
Social Sciences
As a result…very large investment in
disseminating professional GIS tools to schools
professional development for teachers
curriculum materials development
The result of that…very disappointing implementation rate in classrooms

3. What is missing? Attention to the GIS tools themselves…
Professional tools were designed for professionals to be used in professional workplaces
Complexity
Users of GIS tools typically have hundreds of hours of training
Usability
Revenue for GIS developers is in features, not usability.
Technical administration
Difficult to install and maintain in school computing environments

4. Our solution… A learner-appropriate and school compatible GIS tool
Power vs. complexity tradeoff
Identifying essential features for education
Usability
heuristic evaluation and user studies
Technical administration
Simple installation, administration, updating

5. My World GIS™

6. Data Formats Points ESRI shapefile, tab or comma-delimited text files
Polygons and Polylines
ESRI shapefiles
GRIDS
Arcview GRID export, WorldWatcher, netCDF
Images
JPEG with world (TGW) files, geoTIFF

7. Data Organization Data files
Local or remote (via local file system, URL, or THREDDS link)
Data library
List of layer names
Index files
Map from layer name to file location
My World automatically creates an index of its data library at launch.

8. THREDDS Integration
Can currently read grid data from data catalogues via THREDDS
To handle vector data will require data object definitions
Points
Polygons, polylines
To be driven by educational needs, goals, opportunities

9. My World GIS My World team: Principal Investigator: Daniel Edelson
Programmer: Eric Russell
Undergraduate research assistants: Greg Allen, Erin Orawski
Information and free trial download:
This work has been supported in part by the National Science Foundation under grants no , and