===================== maps-l ===================== 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] Oo "There is always hope." My fave: http://www.washington.edu/cambots/camera1_l.gif ----- End forwarded message -----