Students visit GVSU for day of geography-filled Halloween fun

While their nights may have been spent collecting candy, about 30 local middle school students spent their Halloween afternoon collecting knowledge from faculty in Grand Valley State University’s Geography and Planning Department during the 15th annual Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Day.

GIS Day began as a focal point of Geography Awareness Week in 1999 and provides an international forum for users of geographic information systems technology to demonstrate real-world applications that are making a difference in society.

At Grand Valley, seventh grade students from Shawmut Hills School spent an early celebration of GIS Day using GPS devices to navigate across the Allendale Campus to find spooky Halloween-related clues in order to reach a final prize.

“This exercise has been connected to Geocaching where people utilize hand-held GPS receivers to find a hidden cache,” said Kin Ma, assistant professor of geography and planning at Grand Valley.

Ma said students also engaged in computer lab exercises using GIS software to highlight the populations of global cities and their distribution across the globe. The students then used the data to generate a map of the world.

Ma said he hopes events like GIS Day will help students appreciate the role that geography plays in better understanding the world, while also being able to use geographic tools to analyze various spatial phenomena, such as the population differences of global cities.

Geography Awareness Week is an annual public awareness program, organized by National Geographic Education Programs, that occurs the third week of November each year. The event encourages people young and old to think and learn about the significance of “place” and how people affect and are affected by it.