How Large Was Your World



How Large Was Your World?The places we go during our daily lives are part of what is known as “activity space.” Generally, these are the places and routes we are most intimately aware of and knowledgeable about. Essentially, your world at any given time. Activity space changes as our life circumstances do. With age and independence, our range of activity space expands dramatically. One of the most common ways this can be looked at is through the creation of mental maps of our activity space at any given age. Well, technology allows us to go a step farther: the amazing resource that is Google Earth Pro (GEP) allows us to see our activity space and map it out! Because you are going to be teachers, I want to have you work on an activity that could be done with kids in their last couple of years in elementary school. Therefore, we need to place ourselves back into our earlier activity spaces while walking in kindergarten and elementary school, while biking up through middle school and early high school, and as a new driver. Using the tools in GEP, it is possible to identify all of the places you haunted and to draw the extent of your activity space at those ages.In this assignment, following my instructions, you will create four sets of overlays on top of the contemporary and historic satellite imagery in GEP and measure the dimensions of your activity space. You then will create six maps using Print Screen on your keyboard that you’ll insert into a PowerPoint template (that I’ll provide) and crop:Kindergarten Walking Activity SpaceElementary School Walking Activity SpaceMiddle School Biking Activity SpaceHigh School Driving Activity SpaceActivity Space CollageGoogle Earth Historical Image of HomeYou’ll also provide me with a brief summary of what each of the four activity space ranges meant to you then and means to you now.Points: 20Due date: February 17, 2015As it turns out, you will need Google Earth Pro for the “How Large Was Your World?” activity. It’s a good thing that GEP now is free!Saving Google Earth filesFirst, if you’ve already started in basic Google Earth (GE), you will need to save your “Places.” In your list of Places in the left-hand sidebar, right-click My Places and choose Save Place As… in the dropdown. Save that to your desktop (GE will save it as My Places.kmz). Now you have a copy of the code and data that can be loaded into any copy or version of Google Earth products – including the GEP you’re about to install.Upgrading to Google Earth ProYou can upgrade your regular Google Earth by clicking Help > Upgrade to Google Earth Pro and Google Earth will provide you with an installation executable file. Once you’ve downloaded and run the .exe, close GE. You now have both regular GE (blue icon) and GEP (gray icon)! You can remove the original Google Earth through your control panel if space and potential confusion are issues. Always double-click the gray GEP icon to open Google Earth Pro from now on. Now, open GEP. Upon restarting, GEP will ask for your Google ID (email) and authentication code – which is GEPFREE. Click the box for automatic sign-in so you don’t have to repeat that endlessly. Congratulations, you now have a more powerful version of GE to play with!Configuring GEPGEP has a ton of useful tools squirreled away inside it. Much of it we won’t use yet. Step one is to configure GEP for use in GEOG 310. In the upper left in the menu bar, left-click ViewView – in the drop-down list, check: Toolbar; Sidebar; Show Navigation > Automatically; Status Bar; Scale Legend; Atmosphere. Click off Tour Guide.Tools – Next left-click Tools then Options….3D View – in the 3D View window, do the following: check True Color and Compress; choose medium for Anisotropic Filtering; choose small for Labels/Icon Size; make DirectX the Graphics Mode; make Show Lat/long show decimal degrees; make the Units of Measurement Feet. Miles; make the Elevation Exaggeration 2; and check Use 3D Imagery in Terrain.Navigation – in the Navigation window, click Do not automatically tilt while zooming.Google Earth KML File ManagementIn the Places sidebar you’ll find the things you add to GEP. File management will make life easier for you. Right-click My Places. Add a Folder and Name it How Large Was Your World? Now right-click How Large Was Your World? and Add Folders Named Kindergarten, Elementary, Biking, and High School Driving. Now you have nice folders in How Large Was Your World? in which to organize the objects you’ll add in GEP!Navigate to Home BaseIn the left-hand Sidebar, enter your home address in the Search box, including house number, street name, locality, and “VA”. A zip code can stand in for locality and VA! GEP will zoom in on the actual location for you and mark it with a red push pin and address label. Pretty cool, huh? Depending on where this is, the satellite image resolution can be as small as three meters, so anything at least three feet across will be visible. Zoom in more by advancing your mouse flywheel or by ghosting over the magnification bar in the upper right of the screen and left-click “+” a few times. Go ahead: look for a dog house or a chimney!HomeRight-click How Large Was Your World? in Add, click Placemark. GEP automatically places a yellow push pin with crosshairs dead center in the map area. If that isn’t the right location, left-click and hold the push pin and move it over your house. In the Google Earth – New Placemark window, Name the placemark “Home.” Click the push pin icon at the right of the box and choose an icon style, then make the Color yellow (8th color square over, 4th down). Now you have a starting reference point for your ranges! If you had more than one home base over the years, you’ll need to complete this step for each home location.Da Rulz of Activity Space RangesThis was designed so that kindergarten and elementary school were times you were on foot when out of school; they refer to age ranges and were times you probably spent walking pretty close to homeInclude the places that were your “haunts”: places you went multiple times (those are the ones you’ll remember, anyway)Places define the edges of your activity space rangesPay attention to routes you took to get to places; if you just plot four places at the cardinal directions, and connect those dots, you’ll end up with a diamond filled with places you never went (most ranges early on should look like scraggly sea creatures!)If you were driven everywhere, you need to make the most common courses to get there part of your range (even though technically such places really weren’t); again, you’ll end up with squid-like tentacles of travel you’ll most likely not rememberThe ranges are not meant to be precise: if we did them accurately, we’d create something more akin to a spider web with more holes than places and routesDefining Your RangesYou will be creating polygons (a closed figure defined by points (nodes) connected by straight line segments) to outline the extent of your activity space and geographical knowledge at each grade level. To make your finished product easier to read, you’ll be color-coding each range:Kindergarten Walking – yellow (8th across, 4th down)Elementary School Walking – bright blue (7th across, 3rd down)Biking – bright green (7th across, 0 down)High School Driving – red (2nd across, 4th down)These colors stand out on the GEP imagery and can be seen at many zoom levels. For each age level, I added placemarks to mark off the fringes of my ranges. Mine were places I regularly visited, friends’ houses, where I went to kindergarten, playgrounds, sledding hills, etc. That can get pretty involved, depending on your memory. All you really have to do is place markers at the places farthest away from your home/yard, but mind the routes.PlacemarksIf you want to place a selection of places you went in kindergarten, right-click the Places folder under Kindergarten Walking then Add > Placemark. A flashing yellow push pin with crosshairs will appear dead center on your present view. Left-click on the crosshairs and position the push pin wherever you want to mark your range. The placemarks will aid you in keeping track of where your boundaries were. In the Google Earth-New Placemark window, you can give your placemark a Name. At the upper right, click the push pin icon to go to the Icon menu. Choose whatever style icon you like or no new style at all; it’s simplest to stick with the pre-color-coded ones so you can tell your placemarks apart. Change the Color of any icon you choose, but be aware that some of the specialized icons don’t take colors on as readily as others. Follow the steps above and fill each of you folders with placemarks. Your map window will fill up too!PolygonsNow that you have a grouping of placemarks, you can draw a figure around them known as a “polygon.” A polygon is a series of straight lines connecting dots or “nodes.” It pays to realize that all computer mapping programs simply play connect-the-dots. Ironically, curves therefore are a series of closely-spaced dots and straight lines. The more line segments and nodes, the less angular the line will look – unless it’s magnified! See what I meant when I said maps lie? Right-click the Ranges folder, the Add > Polygon. In the Google Earth-New Polygon window, Name the polygon “Kindergarten Walking” (assuming you’re starting at the beginning). Click Style, Color and in that window under Lines, click the Color button and make the color yellow (8th across, 4th down). Then make the Width 2.0. Under Area, click the Color to Outlined and change the Opacity to 50% (more on that later). Now you’re ready to digitize! Digitize?!? Am I qualified to take on such an awesome responsibility at such a tender age, you ask. YES! Remember: all you’re doing is clicking a bunch of dots or nodes that GEP will connect with a yellow 2.0 weight line. You’ll notice a white reticule has replaced your glove. The center of the reticule is where a node will be placed each time you left-click the mouse. Go ahead, play around with it! Click. Move. Click. Move. Like magic, a yellow line follows your every click! Taadaa! Cartography! You’re making a map! Or a mess. You can right-click to delete nodes or simply hit Cancel at the lower right of the Google Earth-New Polygon window and it’s gone. If you want to save the line, hit OK and the feature will be added to your Places at the right in the folder you started with.Activity Space Range PolygonsDraw a circle around my Kindergarten Walking placemarks and you get an area that’s .47 miles across at its broadest and if I right-click my polygon under Places, then Properties > Measurements, I find that it has a perimeter of 1.83 miles and an area of 32 acres (0.05 square miles). Notice that kindergarten activity space is pretty compact, that I never walked terribly far from home, and that I was drawn to the playgrounds and parks, skewing my territory. It’s not perfect: I didn’t pass through yards in the south of my range, I just walked on the sidewalk around our cheese-wedge block. Therefore, my Kindergarten Walking range definitely overstates my territory’s area. It’s the extent of the range we’re after here, really.(Text and diameter for illustrative purposes only) ................
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