Combining Math, GIS, and Community Service Continued from page 67 His official GIS training was a two-week institute at a local university. Most of his GIS training has been informal. "I realized that GIS is very flexible. I played around with it and realized it could be used in so many ways in my classes. You don't need six months of training to have students do simple projects," said Obenhaus. When questions arise that he cannot answer, Obenhaus challenges students to figure out the answers before he does using ArcView online help. When questions cannot be answered using online help, Obenhaus calls on city and county GIS professionals who help. Some local professionals come into class. According to Obenhaus, students really enjoy learning from people who use GIS in their career. In Obenhaus' classroom, the first step in creating a project is having the students think spatially about a problem. He says that coming up with a question is the easy part, because most problems have a spatial component. "I learn from others' examples, so when I find good data online, I think about a question students can answer with it. When I see how professionals solve problems, I start to see the possibilities of what can be done in my own community." This year, his students are collecting data about the water quality of a local stream before, during, and after a construction project. They are using GIS to look at changes not only along the length of the stream but also over time. His next step is helping students figure out a problem-solving approach that combines math and GIS. Students learn the basic functions of ArcView during in-class lessons taken from the Esri Press book series Our World GIS Education. These textbooks include interdisciplinary GIS lesson plans for different academic levels. Once students have a basic understanding of GIS, they stop working on prepared lessons and start working on independent projects. In these projects, they ask a spatial question and find the data needed to answer it. Obenhaus gives students the necessary tools, GIS training, a question, and an approach to problem solving. Then he lets students figure out a solution. "They pick up GIS really quickly when they play with ArcView during their own project, learning by trial and error," said Obenhaus. There is a common thread in his students' projects. In addition to answering a spatial question, students have followed Obenhaus' philanthropic example and worked on projects that serve communities, whether these communities or local or half a world away. Obenhaus and his wife do volunteer work for a maternity and neonatal clinic, Maison de Naissance, in a rural area of southern Haiti. The clinic's mission is to decrease maternal and infant mortality rates in an area with extreme poverty. Water-based diarrheal diseases are the leading 68 ArcUser Spring 2009 In developing countries, children often do most of the water collection. Closer access to safe water not only improves their health but also gives them greater opportunities to attend school. cause of infant mortality in the developing world. When the clinic received funding to build wells to give more families access to clean water sources, the clinic director asked Obenhaus if he and his students could locate these wells. He agreed. When he began the project, Obenhaus had little knowledge of water testing and locating water sources. He began by asking a water analyst how to test water quality. He then traveled to Haiti with donated supplies and trained Haitians to test the water. This work was assisted by one of Obenhaus' students, Elizabeth Vidaurre, who went on to develop her own related project. A distinguished math scholar at Olathe North High School, Vidaurre combined her math and GIS skills in a senior project for determining how to select well locations that would benefit the greatest number of children in need. The water testing results, combined with the clinic's records on the number of children and where they live, were the basis for Vidaurre's research project. "We had two unique data layers that no one else had," said Obenhaus, who had students use ArcView to create basemaps from the data. "At first I thought it would be like playing a computer game, but it was serious work to use GIS," said Vidaurre. "It's a tool that helps you solve real problems. I could have done the project without GIS, but it would have taken much longer to analyze data and would not have been as accurate." With help from a Kansas GIS professional, Vidaurre used ArcView to create buffers around the homes of families living more than 350 meters from a clean water source. With this information, she analyzed where the highest clusters of children without access to clean water were located. www.esri.com