Map Games

Maps are used in almost every class room in the country and around the world. Maps help students get oriented with location of certain places on the globe. With today's technology, maps are no longer just stationary on paper. Students can now use map games on the internet that allow them to interact with the maps. Some maps light up when the curser is placed over a location. This turns into a memory type game. When something lights up, it enables the brain to associate that lit up place with the color that lights. The website http://www.sheppardsoftware.com/web_games.htm, has a list of interactive games for children involving maps. Examples are landscape maps that highlight a specific geographic region, lake maps that highlight the lakes in the U.S., capital maps that involving picking the correct capital for the highlighted states and many more. This website is mainly geared towards a younger population, most likely 1st to 6th grade. The next website, http://www.maps.com/FunFacts.aspx is for an older population such as middle school to highschool. It has games such as trivia and crossword puzzles. It also deals with the whole world unlike the other website which is U.S. based. By turning maps into games, it gets students actively involved in what they are learning, rather than just staring at a paper map and listening to a techer talk. Also, some of the games keep score so it is a competitive thing to want to have a high score. In order to get that high score, the students have to learn places on the map.

New England Recreation Mapping

New England has great places to vacation and enjoy the great outdoors. From camping to white water rafting, New England has something for everyone. In the 2009-2010 getaway guide for Massachusetts, there are plenty of suggestions for family trips. The guide uses more charts than maps to show various activities. It is a very visual guide in order to catch the reader's eye. Pictures portray Massachusetts recreation in a way that makes you want to pack right now. There are a few small maps in the guide, but they just show generalized locations of the activity. In the very back of the guide, there is a road map of Massachusetts, but it is a little small, and hard to use if one is trying to find a route. The other guide is very similar, except it's for New Hampshire. It uses photographs to pull you into the recreation being advertised. There is also a road map in the back, but again, a little small. As far as mapping the actual recreational activity, these guides aren't the best. They can tell you how to get to an area, but the maps don't show the actual state forest or campsite.

Mapping Community

Making a map of a community doesn't necessarily mean that it will just be a map of streets and major roads. Mapping community can be so much more. In order to map a community, demographics of the specific area should be considered. This is because mapping a community should involve the different people as well as the different landforms. Things such as race, levels of income and numbers of children should be considered. A community map could show blocks of the neighborhoods that have the most children or even different blocks where the most number of specific races live. Another part of a community is important landmarks. Most communities are proud of something that they are recognized for. For example, Seattle Washington is known for the space needle, while New York City is known for the Statue of Liberty. A community map could have symbols on it that represent landmarks such as these.

This link shows a good example of a community map, although hard to see the small symbols, it shows points of interest (landmarks) within the community.
http://www.wccda.org/content/resources/images/community-map-lg.jpg

Blog Bucket- Mobile Maps

Maps don't have to be stationary on a piece of paper. A good amount of people use forms of mobile maps on a day to day basis. An example of a mobile map, or several mobile maps, can be found in GoogleEarth. GoogleEarth provides interactive maps that move with the user's click of a mouse. The maps are aerial views of anywhere in the world. The view of places on Earth is great for planning trips because you can get a realistic view of the area you will be traveling. You can also use the mouse to move along the roads in your trip. The form of mobile maps most commonly used today are found in GPS. A GPS device is 100% a mobile map. The map moves along with the user as they drive, making it virtually impossible to get lost.

http://marathonmemoirs.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/garmin-nuvi-travel-gps2.jpg
This is a link to an example of a GPS.

A link to an example of GoogleEarth, and the ability to use interactive tools such as locating a local wireless service.

Planning Perspective

One thing I found interesting on the ESRI website is the land use planning section. I'm very in to planning out land for development and looking over legal constraints. I like to see what a developer can and can't do based on endangered species, wetlands and zoning. The website offers maps of various land uses across the U.S. along with case studies. GIS is a big tool in land use management. It is useful in that you can locate and view a site without having to drive to it day in and day out. GIS also offers zoning as a layer and other environmental issues such as flood plains, as another. I've always liked mapping sites and applying layers to them. The ESRI case studies let me see what other people are doing hundreds of miles away, so I can compare my approach and work to theirs. It's another useful tool that I can now go to if need be.

Critique on Social Explorer

The social explorer website is very informative regarding demographics in the United States. Although it has a very plain home page, once you start looking at all the census maps, it gets more interesting. I found it cool that there is a carbon emissions map. I am an environmental science major and have written a paper on carbon emissions. It's right up my alley. There are also maps for religion, which are useful to community planners, in case there is a need for a church. They can see what type of church would best suit the area that they are planning. The website is just good in general to see how advanced population has become in size over hundreds of years. It is really neat that the maps date back to the 1700's. The most recent map added is the location of Haitians in the U.S. after the earthquake. This is good in order to see just where they have been relocated to. The website is useful for students, teachers, planners and the government.

Mapping Music

Maps are generally thought to be pictures of geographic places or routes and directions to locations. This is true, but maps can also be used for us to identify with things we enjoy on a daily basis. For instance, the music we listen to can be traced on a map of a state, a country or even the entire world. We all listen to music, but we probably don't think about what the route to the origins of our favorite music would look like.
I enjoy a lot of different genres of music. If someone was to listen to my ipod, they would find themselves listening to country one minute, and then hip hop the next. I also have classic rock and pop in the mix. In order for me to map some of my music, I took a few of my favorite artists/bands and found their origins, along with where some of their songs came from. I really enjoy Creedence Clearwater Revival, and to my surprise, they originated in the San Francisco Bay area. I always thought they were from the south, especially with a song such as "Born on the bayou." The song "Green River" is about a river in Kentucky, so even though they are a band formed on the western coast, their lyrics reflect and focus on the south for the most part. I decided to focus more on the songs at this point in order to get a centralized location, so my first point on a map would be the southern United States.
Country music also centralizes in the south, with songs like "Sweet Home Alabama" and "The Devil Went Down To Georgia." Country songs of course reference Texas, with a couple songs I can think of like, "God Bless Texas" and "All My Ex's Live In Texas." Creedence and Country music are centralized in the south, so my map didn't change much. My next favorite music to listen to however, took me to another part of the world. I landed in Liverpool, England. That's right, The Beatles. Songs like "Abbey Road" and "Penny Lane" are actual locations in England. In doing this exercise, I found that geography influences all kinds of maps, not just physical feature maps or driving directions. If I were to follow some of my favorite music based on songs written and origins, I'm pretty sure I would be going on quite the adventure!

Map of The Beatles origin

Map of Centralized Creedence and Country music



Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creedence_Clearwater_Revival
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beatles
www.Google.com/ Images