2021 Middle & High School (Grades 4-12) ARCGIS ONLINE STORY MAP COMPETITION – Mapping Indiana: Past, Present and New Realities

THE NATIONAL COMPETITION

Middle and high school students and their teachers across the U.S. are invited to explore their world and create interesting online maps about their home state. The 2021 ArcGIS Online US School Story Map Competition is open to middle school (grades 4-8) and high school (grades 9-12) students in the U.S who analyze and present data via an ArcGIS Online presentation, web app, or story map.

THE INDIANA COMPETITION

The 2021 theme for our statewide selection is “Mapping Indiana: Past, Present and New Realities”. The maps should be about places and themes related to Indiana and should tell a compelling story. What kind of story could be told with maps? There is a wide range of possibilities, from the local ecology of your hometown, stories about immigration to your community, natural treasures in your community/state, or peculiarities of Hoosier culture, environmental problems and other topics of interest to your students.

THE PARTICIPANTS

The Geography Educators’ Network of Indiana (GENI) invites all middle and high school teachers and students to take part in this competition. All grades 4-12 public, private, or homeschooled students in Indiana are eligible to enter the contest. Each participating school selects up to 5 submissions.

THE MAP

The competition is an initiative to stimulate the use of GIS/geospatial technologies in schools and teach students to engage with their reality, analyze problems, and think critically about space and place. Participants use ArcGIS Online to create an original map that features an interesting story about Indiana. You can find a large number of (professional) story map examples at https://www.esri.com/en-us/arcgis/products/arcgis-storymaps/stories.

ArcGIS Online is available to any K-12 school in the United States free of charge. Go to http://www.esri.com/industries/education/software-bundle#%20  (scroll down) to sign up for a free ArcGIS Online School Organization Account or to https://storymaps.arcgis.com to create an individual account. All are safe and secure! You will not be inundated with e-mails, either.

PRIZES

All students who submit maps and their teachers will receive a participation certificate from the Geography Educators’ Network of Indiana (GENI). The five maps judged the best in each category (middle school and high school) will be awarded $100 Amazon.com gift cards.

HOW TO GET STARTED?

Samples from previous competitions and additional information are available on the following webpages: http://arcg.is/AGOschoolcomptotal (results from 2017-2020), http://esriurl.com/agoschoolcomp (quick intro) and http://esriurl.com/agoschoolcompinfo (full details).

For further materials and assistance, please get in touch with Jörn Seemann (mappingindiana@gmail.com), go the Mapping Indiana Facebook Group (https://www.facebook.com/groups/2467716709977131/)or visit the GENI website for updates (https://geni.iupui.edu/). The deadline for submitting student maps for the statewide competition is May 05, 2021, 11:59 p.m. State Awardees will be announced by May 21, 2021.