Fun with GIS 324: Special Achievement 2023
At the 2023 Esri User Conference, a few hundred organizations from across USA and around the world each received a "Special Achievement in GIS Award" (colloquially: "SAG Award"). These go to far less than one tenth of one percent of all organizations using Esri software. Each is personally considered and approved by Esri President Jack Dangermond. This year, in K12 education, it went to Clark Magnet High School, of Glendale School District, in La Crescenta, near Los Angeles, California. Science/CTE teacher Dominique Evans-Bye was on hand to receive the award and talk with Dangermond.
SAG Awards represent a level of achievement to which others in the community can aspire. Evans-Bye has incorporated ArcGIS into a three-course CTE GIS pathway:
- Introductory-Honors Geography of Disasters
- Concentrator-Honors GIS & Remote Sensing
- Capstone-Honors Environmental GIS
Other courses that use ArcGIS at Clark Magnet include The Living Earth and AP Environmental Science.
In the Map Gallery at the User Conference, in the Youth Community Mapping zone, Evans-Bye talked with interested educators and other users, who were looking for ideas to try in their classes, and for potential students for their college programs, and perhaps even for potential employees. The knowledge, skills, and perspectives built up through years of experience investigating real world problems for which there is often no specific, pre-determined step-by-step plan to solve a problem is extremely valuable.
Schools, districts, states, clubs, and other programs have earned SAG Awards. It takes focus, hard work, and persistence, but it starts with a vision of what can be done with these powerful tools in the hands of eager learners and dedicated educators.