Students create national atlases for Eritrea, Thailand and Nepal

Summary: Calvin College geographic information systems (GIS) students have created national atlases for three developing countries. One student will present the story of the Calvin atlas project in April at a national conference in Washington D.C.

See full story: www.calvin.edu/news/2009-10/gis-atlas/

A group of Calvin College students have created online national atlases for Eritrea, Thailand and are currently working on Nepal. Calvin geography professor Jason VanHorn is overseeing the project being created by his geographic information systems classes (GEO 222).

"Most developing nations do not have the capacity to produce national atlases," said VanHorn. "As a result, students (in developing nations) lack a comprehensive resource to thoroughly investigate their own country."

Now Calvin students are putting their classroom learning into practice and helping developing countries in the process. Calvin students have worked countless hours creating national atlases for these three countries, with more to come. The atlases consist of several maps, which visually represent such things as population density, monthly income per household, religious distribution, crime statistics; even how many dentists there are in a country.

Calvin senior geography major Andrew Quackenbush is one of the students who had a hand in this project. He and VanHorn co-authored an article on Calvin's atlas project, which will likely appear in an international geography journal. Then in April, Quackenbush will tell the story of the project at the Association of American Geographers national conference in Washington, D.C.

VanHorn says that GIS and geospatial information have been identified as a high-growth industry by the Career Voyages Program, a collaboration between the U.S. Departments of Labor and Education. The ability for Calvin students to get their hands on industry-standard software and work on a project with international implications will only help in their future careers.

The project can be viewed online at gis.calvin.edu/atlas/index.html

For more information on the Calvin atlas project, contact Jason Van Horn at 616-526-7623 or at jvanhorn@calvin.edu

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Received on Mon Mar 29 13:38:03 2010