TEACHING K-12 STUDENTS ABOUT THE LOCAL PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENT THROUGH AN INTERACTIVE INTERNET MAP VIEWER

The Kent State NSF- funded GK-12 program entitled NEOGEO (NorthEast Ohio Geoscience Education Outreach) supports 10 Graduate Fellows who share their content knowledge with teachers and students in K-12 schools. We collaborate with Stark County educators and students and focus on inquiry-based approaches to earth systems science.

To help meet the goals of the program, an on-line, interactive environmental map viewer of Stark County was created. The mapper is equipped with tools that, in part, enable viewers to measure, zoom in and out, query data, and create buffers. Layers include geologic, hydrologic, topographic, and environmental themes. Teachers and students are encouraged to navigate through the mapper, which is accessed from a link at the Kent State University website (http://neogeo.kent.edu/). In addition to understanding the local physical environment by viewing different layers, lesson plans have been created (also posted on the website) which focus on acquiring data from the mapper and then further analysis in a spreadsheet to reveal spatial patterns. Relationships between different layers are determined through the construction of a Pearson correlation matrix. Another activity calls for ranking similar size watersheds in regards to time of concentration. Time of concentration is the time required for a water particle to travel from the most distant point in the watershed to the outlet.