Chapter 7: Geospatial Online Learning Activities For Middle School Students

Maps, statistics, and their mutual relationship play important, often ubiqui-tous, roles in our lives. Humans utilize maps to look up a variety of spatial information in the environment (restaurants, driving directions, etc.) and apply statistics for identifying patterns (e.g. crime areas) or conducting preferred location analysis (e.g. a house search). Many of the applied spatial and statistical datasets are publicly available through local, state and federal government agencies. Over the past several years, government webbased services, such as FedStats (www.fedstats.gov) or the National Atlas (www.nationalatlas.gov), have provided increasingly comprehensive reposi-tories through which citizens can look up statistical and geospatial information on the Internet (see Kerski, this volume).