Map Games

http://www.maps.com/games/mapquiz.aspx



At this website is a game where it asks you questions about the continents and you have to scroll over them and click the right one and it tells you if you're correct or not. It's a good game for kids to learn about each continent and what makes them different from one another.




This is another game that I found online. It's basically a puzzle and you put the different countries in their correct locations. All the games I came across online were very informative to kids to learn where different countries are located or where states are located.

One thing that these sites didn't show were pictures. When it comes to our atlas I feel like we should show lots of pictures to go along with each map. Kids are better visual learners, so having pictures will probably help the information to sink in.

Recreation Mapping

When it comes to recreation there are lots of activities you can put onto a map. The different activities that could go on a map could be camping, snowboarding, skiiing, cross country skiing, good hiking areas, fishing, swimming, boating, etc.. Below is a link to a map of Massachusetts shoing different recreation activities to do.

http://www.mass.gov/dfwele/dfw/recreation/publications/recreation_map.pdf

What they do on the second page is list all of the state parks or forests in Massachusetts. Next to each of the forests or state parks there are a bunch of columns. Each column is a different recreation activity. If the site has a certain recreation activity it puts an X under that category.

This is map of the hiking trails at the Blue Hills Reservation in Eastern MA near Boston. The top of this mountain has a really nice view. You can see the entire Boston Skyline from the top. Blue hills only has a few trails but this map is very useful when you're planning a hike.

Granville, Granville, Granville

Granville,MA

Granville was first settled in 1736 and was officially incorporated in 1754. Granville, MA has a population of 1,521 and is a total of 43 sq. miles.

Granville, OH

The population in Granville, OH is around 3,200. The Granville in Ohio has a much bigger population than the one in Massachusetts, but it has less square mileage. It only consists of 4 sq. miles. This is compared to Granville, MA which consists of 43 sq. miles.

Granville, IA

Granville, IA is the smallest of the three Granville's. It has a population of only 321. You can see the difference from this community compared to the other ones in this photo of the town. It consists of only a few blocks of roadway and houses.

Mapping Politics

This is an image of the Electoral Map when McCain went up against Clinton. This is probably a map that most people are familiar with.

This is another take on political mapping. This shows a map of the roots of President Obama. They are saying that he may have German roots.

Nevada Train Tracks

This is a shot of the train tracks going over the Carson River. The river is a little off, but it’s cool to see where the river used to be and how small it’s gotten over time.



The tracks branched off. The red goes to Reno and the Blue goes towards Virginia.



In other sections of the train tracks you can see on the ground the pathway of where the train tracks used to go. Here, on the other hand there are no remnants of the tracks. There is a neighborhood that was built right over the tracks.




Most of the main streets were built over where the old tracks used to go.

3D Mapping, Transportation and Community Planning

The two things that I thought were really interesting from the two websites were the 3D mapping of communities and the transportation and community planning. Having the buildings be 3D really helps in visualizing what a new project will look like. It's definitely faster than drawing what it will look like and it's more visually pleasing on the eye. You can zoom down right to the street view and see the road, trees, houses, cars, and even grass can be put in the model.

http://placeways.com/products/modelbuilder3d.php

This is an example of the 3D technology. You can see that it really shows a lot of detail in the model of the house. If a customer wanted a certain texture on the building, for instance brick, this 3d technology could easily show that. I would definitely like to work with this technology. It seems really fun and it would probably be very rewarding to see the finished product.


http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/tcsp/case7.html

I just thought this map was cool so i just threw it in here. It shows the walk travel times to different schools. It's a very visually pleasing map that is really easy to read and is very helpful for schools. They can determine what students are outside of the walkable distances to school. The kids outside of the area would probably have the choice to take a bus to school.

Social Explorer

The Social Explorer website can definitely be used for doing research into the social, cultural, and ethnic histories of places. There's a lot of options you can choose from to make a good looking map. You can choose from population to percent of people born in Europe living across the U.S. You can see the percent born in Europe if you follow the link on the bottom of this post. I was really surprised to see how many people born in Europe lived in the U.S. So i basically just fooled around with the website and made a bunch of different maps. You can check them out if you follow the links below.




Map 1: % Born in Europe

You can see in this map that they're definitely more concentrated in the northeastern portion of the U.S.

The next map I focused on the unemployment percentage focused in the Boston area.

Map 2: Unemployment in Boston