Esri's NYC Office - Hands-on Training with MAPSCore
Last week, Esri's NYC office teamed up with The Mount Sinai Adolescent Health Center’s MAPSCorps team, which is comprised of college student leaders (the Field Coordinators) who manage teams of high school students (the Youth Mappers) who then serve as mobile data collectors to itemize and validate the locations, status, and attributes of various resources, in selected neighborhoods across NYC. The student teams then analyze the data collected against various health problems identified for those neighborhoods and communities as part of their summer symposium presentations. At the present moment, the MAPSCorps program are using ArcGIS to help them manage data collected in the field and map it, analyzing resource availability for these specific health issues and services. ArcGIS Story Maps will be used to present their observations, findings, and stories through flexible, interactive, and functional web application. This is where we came into the picture...
On July 31st, staff from Esri’s NYC office conducted a workshop for the college student leaders. We needed to cover a lot of ground fast, and get them productive as soon as possible, so the workshop followed the Data > Design > Develop pattern. Hands-on examples were used to have the students practice with techniques for working with data: for searching, finding, converting, modifying, creating, editing, and verifying it all. The better the data, the better the solution. Luckily the City of New York is one of the more forward-moving cities in the U.S. when it comes to its support of transparent government and citizen engagement supported by open data.
It was great to see how inspired the students were to apply our tools and make a difference. We look forward to following up with them in the month of August to see where their work on Story Maps takes them.
To be continued...