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maps-l
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Date: Sat, 16 Jul 2005 07:05:23 -0700
From: "Dr. Virginia R. Hetrick" <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re:  Cartographic exercise
To: "Maps, Air Photo & Geospatial Systems Forum" <[log in to unmask]>


One of the things I used to do is to give students a map with a
coastline with all the long/lat values and place names "blanked out",
allow them to use any resources they wanted, and ask them to identify
the location.  I do leave the North arrow (or other directional
orientation) on the map.  I've since done that with small area maps of
the area where the students are from as well as "state" size maps.  I
always find it amazing that students can't identify the states simply by
their shapes. (I guess I haven't watched Jaywalking enough to be fully
cognizant of Americans' geographic ignorance!)

The general strategy for this kind of problem should be that they
identify places on a world map that have the same coastline orientation
and then look in an atlas to see which has the same coastline shape as
the map.

I have a Beagle chart of the Singapore Roads and never had a student
identify the area, even though one student I gave it to had sailed in
that area and another had vacationed there, neither of them could do
it.  I guess why I was amazed is there's not any place else in the world
that I can think of that has an "oval-shaped" island with a narrow
strait on the north.

Another exercise is to put an overlay (an overhead transparency works
fine) on maps with certain features circled or pointed to and ask the
students to do a couple of things:

1.  Figure out the distance between a feature you've labelled and a
nearby city, or two cities
2.  Figure out which of several pairs of features are closer together by
road distance and which are closer together by flight distance
3.  On a top sheet, mark an orchard/grove and ask them what the green
dots are
4.  If you have Ordnance Survey sheets, mark features on those sheets
and similar features on a top sheet and ask the students to observe
what's different about how the two different organizations represent the
same kind of feature

On an overlay of the city, have the students mark where each of them
lives and then have them look at the distribution with a second overlay
showing concentric circles centered on the university (Library maybe?).
Then have them think about the distance decay function with respect to
the combined residential location pattern.

The last exercise is to give them a travelling salesman problem, i.e., a
list of places to be connected by a single path.  The problem is to work
out the shortest road distance that will connect all the places.  It's
kind of cute here to make sure that they have to come back through one
or two places so that the path crosses but that they don't go on the
same link of the path more than once, i.e., you can touch a place more
than once as long as you don't use any link more than once.

HTH.

virginia
--
\ /     Virginia R. Hetrick, here in sunny California
 0      Voicemail:  310.471.1766  Email:  [log in to unmask]
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