2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

We are reporting on the work-in-progress Geospatial Skills Camp for rising 9th and 10th grade students hosted by [UNIVERSITY]. Our camp design is unique in that while we will be hosting the camp through [UNIVERSITY], the camps are designed to be run by community educators in the students’ local communities. These community educators are embedded within the community and may be classroom teachers but might also include scout leaders, librarians or afterschool educators. We are training the educators remotely and providing support and virtual connections to [UNIVERSITY] while the camp itself will be local and driven by local issues. Our curriculum integrates place-based education, local phenomena, and geospatial skills including the engineering design process and problem solving. This requires an approach in which our curriculum design must be informed by the local community educators in collaboration with our team at [UNIVERSITY]. In addition to seeing all camp activities correlated with potential careers, students will be encouraged to relate camp skills and experiences to their own individual interests such as robotics, human performance or aviation; community needs, such as natural resources management, precision agriculture or meteorological forecasting; and national topics of interest such as security, energy or climate change. This paper also presents the initial findings of a small survey of geospatial professionals regarding key skills and topics for this age group to engage them in learning about careers that incorporate geospatial skills such as environmental engineering, geospatial analysis, and geospatial intelligence. We will also discuss next steps in the development and delivery of this curriculum, including the methods of collaborating with community educators to generate local phenomena to explore using geospatial skills.