Fun with GIS #325: MapMaker's Magic
National Geographic MapMaker, unveiled for the world by three rising 6th graders in the 2023 Esri User Conference plenary, has one simple but profound magical power for learners of all ages. This power — “new perspective” — derives from several different capacities, and happens from the first instant, even before dealing with any of the built-in “maps and layers.”
Watch new explorers work with MapMaker and you’ll see a series of actions repeated almost endlessly, in infinite variation: pan, zoom in, zoom out, search, shift 2D-3D, tilt, rotate, swap basemap. Over and over, users will employ these simple steps because of innate curiosity and an intuitive interface, building profoundly important background and mindsets:
- What’s it like in places I know?
- How does that compare with places I’ve heard about, and with places I don’t know about?
- What patterns and relationships are visible at different scales?
Pan and Zoom enable endless exploration, and are fundamental in building the massively important sense of scale. Those weaned on static maps have had a much harder time building a facility with scale. Zooming out, in, out, in, changing the map extent, and zooming again in, out, in, out … these steps build better senses of here/there, nearer/farther, similar/different, larger/smaller. Each of these explorations generates questions, even if not articulated aloud. The capacity for conceptualizing, asking, and addressing such geographic questions is essential for one to be a well-informed member of the world. The simple “What’s where?” question leads to “Why?” (even at a young age), and ultimately to “So what?”
What's the big deal? Without a sense of "What's where? Why is it there? So what?", one hasn't a ghost of a chance of grasping the enormity of challenges facing us today. The capacity to perceive, grasp, and cope effectively with issues depends on one's ability to think from multiple perspectives, at multiple scales. We may weep for the devastation caused by recent fires in Hawaii, and any number of other disasters, but until we grasp scale, we cannot hope to appreciate the magnitude of the challenge we face in the coming years. Students of even a very young age can begin building the basic understandings necessary to help us move toward a better world. They can build that perspective with MapMaker.