CENSUS 1790: A GIS PROJECT

In July of 1998 I had the good fortune to attend a paid in-service class at Los Angeles Trade Technical College on advanced technologies. Teachers from elementary to college level were exposed to Micro Station, the full Microsoft Office suite, several multimedia programs and ArcView 3.0. It took only several classes for me to realize the great potential GIS held for education.

I informed the instructor, Michael Rendler, that I was extremely interested in furthering my studies of ArcView and he was kind enough to spend many hours tutoring me on the program. He has since become my mentor and we have spent many hours experimenting with educational applications for ArcView .

My first class project in the in-service session was an American Civil War Battle interactive (hotlinks) map, which convinced me I had to have this program in my classroom. The school purchased the Arc View for Schools and Libraries bundle; I signed up for the online ESRI courses and spent the rest of the summer attaining a minimum proficiency with ArcView.

I felt confident enough to take the first steps in classroom instruction. Since I am a Social Studies teacher teaching U.S. History, World History, and Geography, all GIS instruction would revolve around Social Studies courses. In the new educational environment of standards and test results GIS instruction would have to support the curriculum and California State Social Studies Framework.

I teach at Jordan High School in the Los Angeles Unified School District. My school is located in the Watts community of Los Angeles. The population of the school is 79% Hispanic and 21% African-American. Standardized test relegate Jordan to the bottom 10% and the school is located in one of the poorest communities in the United States.

I consider myself very fortunate to have in my Social Studies Classroom twenty- two networked computers for student use, one server, and one teacher workstation. Unfortunately the classroom is not hooked up to the Internet and my students have not been able to use the many rich GIS orientated sites on the WWW. This will change in 2000 as the whole school is now being wired.

I began teaching GIS to most of my classes but shifted the emphasis to my one 9th grade Geography class. Later in the year I taught ArcView to other teachers’ classes in the two computer lab periods I had at the time. My biggest fear had been whether I could successfully instruct the students -if they could actually learn the program to perform GIS projects on their own. This fear was quickly allayed as many of the students became proficient with the software. Many of the students were able to create projects based on data they researched themselves. I used several CD-ROM based history programs and multimedia encyclopedias as research resources. I downloaded several WWW sites including the CIA site at http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/ and made them available on each student computer.

We accomplished two major projects. The first was validating the proposition that ”High Income is a result of increased education”. We used data obtained from http://csars.calstatela.edu/ . They have both online and CD based data with extensive coverage of Los Angeles County. Each student turned in a validation of the proposition, which included layouts of all relevant data. I might mention here how helpful ESRI staff members Angela Lee and Charlie Fitzpatrick were. I could always count on them for a quick email response when I got stuck in some aspect of the program. Los Angeles Trade Technical College offered an early morning Saturday class similar to one I attended and six of our students attended. I now had enough evidence to propose an exclusive GIS course for the 1999-2000 school year. Due to mandates on our school to increase the number of technology class offerings it was approved and I began teaching the course in September of 1999.

Over 40 students were programmed into the class. Several of students had no idea what GIS was and others had poor basic computer skills. The majority of students were eager to learn and I was fortunate in having several of last year’s GIS students. We started with the tutorials in “Getting to Know ArcView”, the tutorial chapters that come with the ArcView 3.1 manual, and several other learning exercises downloaded from the Internet. The majority of the students mastered the basics of ArcView and were now able to work on more sophisticated assignments.

I had been thinking about an ArcView project mapping the 1790 census. I came upon the idea after purchasing the “Historical United States County Boundary Files” (HUSCO) from http://www.cadgis.lsu.edu/geoscipub/ . Unfortunately, for our project, the shape files are on a county level and the task of entering data for every county in 1790 could not be accomplished due to time constraints. The census data came from the “United States Historical Census Data Browser” http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/census/ . Since we could not find a way of converting the WWW Census data automatically to a database our only option was to enter the data manually. To the best of my knowledge this project has not been done before and it would be a chance for my students to create new GIS data. I decided to use Microsoft Access as the core database for the project. Access’s form entry method would simplify the process of entering data from the census tables. I had used Access in previous years classes and knew students could quickly master its fairly simple command structure. Each student received a Xeroxed set of the Census Bureau’s 1790 data. This data consisted of twenty-seven fields for the sixteen States in the United States in 1790. After receiving instructions on using Access the students began their project by creating a new table and form. Entering the data took from five to seven of class time depending on the students proclivity to save or not save their work. Several students had to start from scratch two or three times due to save errors. We all learned a lot about saving data in Access.

With the Access table completed we had to bring it into ArcView 3.1. We used two methods. The first was exporting the table in a DB3 format. The second, and the preferred, was using the ODBC and SQL protocols. Once we knew the tables could be successfully brought into ArcView we began preparing a host project. As mentioned previously we could not use the HUSCO shape files so the students had to construct their own map of 1790 America. The one insurmountable problem was the state of West Virginia, which did not exist in 1790. We could never solve the problem of removing the state boundary line between West Virginia and Virginia so we reluctantly decided to leave out the West Virginia portion of Virginia, as it existed in 1790.

We used the state map from the “QSTART” shape files that come with ArcView 3.1. The students quickly constructed the 1790 map and proceeded to add in and join the converted Access 1790 census table. There were numerous problems adding and joining the table until we worked out all the bugs. The culminating task of the project was the creation and printing of 10 to 20 layouts illustrating population characteristics of 1790 America. Almost all the students who participated in the project were successful and gained a solid base of GIS skills that we can carry onto other projects.

Map of Slavery in 1790, produced using US Census Data

Several other projects we will work on this school year will involve using the 1850 and 1860 Census to determine the factors that caused the Civil War and the factors that led the Union to total victory in 1865. Other projects will involve investigating World War II through such data as manufacturing capacity, population, and natural resources. Indeed it is possible to envision whole Social Studies courses built around GIS with students researching, interacting and creating their own historical data. Several general conclusions I have reached regarding teaching GIS in a high School setting include:

• GIS is a valuable and motivating educational tool whose use in the classroom is in its infancy.
  
• Very few k-12 schools are equipped with the computers or, more importantly, the teachers to implement its classroom use.
  
• The learning curve to become a competent GIS instructor is steep and prior computer skills a necessity.
  
• The existence of GIS is unknown among the vast majority of teachers and a way must be found to “spread the word”.
  
• Teachers who use GIS are scattered and some method should be found to bring them together. Teachers are poorly paid and cannot be expected to fund their own attendances at conventions.
  
• ESRI and other GIS companies are beginning to recognize they must get more involved if they want more k-12 students exposed to GIS.
  
• Some funding mechanism must be found to allow creative teachers the time to write GIS lessons. Classroom teachers work all day with no opportunity for research during their school day.
  
• Corporate, University and Governmental GIS users should seek out and support teachers using GIS in their classrooms.
  
• GIS has the potential to become a major player in the tools available to educators to motivate and develop technology skills for their students.
• School Boards and school administrators need to be informed about the uses of GIS in the classroom.
  
• As a teacher of 28 years I have never seen students so involved with learning. I have never worked as hard as I have with my GIS class and have never enjoyed teaching as much.