Adaptation of QGIS tools in high school geography education

Abstract

In the last decades, geography teachers have been trying to figure out how to adopt GIS (Geographic Information Systems) tools for their high school classes. Predominantly, teachers have come to use commercial versions. Lately, it has been QGIS getting more attention, especially in environments where teachers do not have access to sufficient funding. Nevertheless, there is a lack of ample research results and available teaching materials for geography teachers that want to give QGIS in their lessons a go. This paper presents our attempt to bridge this gap. We have set several goals in our search for the possibilities of adopting QGIS tools for high school geography lessons. The main one was to learn about the strategies that students have when they are learning about QGIS. Furthermore, we wanted to know what knowledge the students would demonstrate after attending a short course on QGIS basics and if their learning strategies during the lectures would impact their results. To find out, we created a set of 10 lessons and tested most of them on students from a high school in Brno, Czech Republic. The results of two pilot studies show that our research has not ended and that further investigation needs to be made about the circumstances that can affect a successful adaptation of QGIS tools in high school geography education.