Macleans on the map

By ADAM GIFFORD

Macleans College in Bucklands Beach is leading schools in using geographic information systems (GIS) in geography lessons.

The school will outline its work at an open day for Auckland's schools at the Auckland Regional Council this Friday, held to mark the World GIS Day (www.gisday.com).

The council's GIS team leader Tony Batistich says the Minister of Information Technology, Maurice Williamson, will present the Macleans students their prize for Eagle Technology's national competition for education projects, using tools made by United States firm ESRI (Environment Systems Research Institute), the leading vendor of GIS software.

It is the second year in a row the school has beaten university projects to win.

Mr Batistich, a former geography teacher who has mentored the Macleans team, says the college was chosen to pilot the council's GIS in Schools project because of the enthusiasm shown by its head of geography, Philip Coombe (coincidentally one of his former students).

The prize-winning project grew out of work Mr Batistich was doing for the council's social and economic group. He got the students to put together a study of land take-up and business development in nearby East Tamaki.

They used council data as well as other data such as aerial photography, which allowed them to map the rate of land take-up over the years and how that fitted employment growth.

They then compared the area with the North Harbour industrial estate at Albany, Ascot Park in Mangere and Sylvia Park in Mount Wellington.

"They gathered comparative ideas and then decided to take the GIS a stage further into spatial analysis to create a model for business location.

"They created a model which incorporated 12 layers of information in the GIS and produced a final map which shows areas of high attractions - access to motorways and arterial roads, vacant land, zoning, land value, the local skill mix from census data, and journey-to-work data."

Mr Batistich says the students also produced a 70-page report for the council, setting up a consultancy so they could learn the roles involved in such projects.

The project proved to be more than just teaching GIS and brought out the students' intellectual and analytical capacities. They defined GIS as software used to interact with spatial data, but which - in a wider sense - can be "seen as less of a focus on software and more as an interpreter of geographic information."

Eagle Technology GIS business unit manager, Bruce Harold, says GIS Day is an international effort designed to encourage use and understanding of the technology.

Eagle is also offering schools free software worth about $25,000.

"We've had our GIS software in universities for a long time. Because the ease of use has improved by orders of magnitude, it's now appropriate to get it into secondary schools," Mr Harold says.

"Spatial processing is now part of mainstream IT."

Schools on the programme will be connected to mentors from Eagle's user base, who will help students design applications and projects and give informal training."