March revealed a madness for more than just basketball around Madison.
It was a chance for faculty and staff in the The Cartography Laboratory to share their work with the community.
The lab, which is housed in the Department of Geography, received several requests to visit classrooms or host visits from nearby middle schools.
These requests, made by local schools, were fueled either by a student with adoration of creating maps or because work in the classroom had included a study of maps.
One such school visit started at an elementary school in Waunakee where one child’s interest with maps inspired him to create stacks of hand drawn maps with incredible detail.
His teacher, wanting to feed this interest, went searching for someone who could explain what a cartographer does all day.
Tim Wallace, a PhD student in Geography, accompanied Tanya Buckingham, the Assistant Director of the Cartography Laboratory, to the second grader classroom. The students completed two exercises—both emphasizing the decisions a cartographer must make for each map, while considering the map reader and intended audience.
The students also explored ideas of map scale, symbology, and a selection of the things important to the story told by the map. They also made a map of their classroom, with the purpose of orienting a new student.
The next map adventure took place on campus in Science Hall at UW-Madison.
Buckingham greeted 60 seventh grade students from Madison and introduced them to the Robinson Map Library. There, Jaime Stoltenberg and the library staff carefully selected over forty maps for the students to explore.
Karen Tuerk, the GIS Certificate Program Manager, also guided the students for over an hour through questions which challenged them to read the maps in new ways.
Following the map reading exercise, the students moved to a classroom for a lecture and discussion on cartography.
The mapping events of March went out like a lamb, with a stop at a Madison Preschool where Buckingham met with a group of four-year-olds. She discussed ideas of living in a globalized world with them, from wind and water to products and travel.
The students also spent some time creating maps for the Barbara Petchenik Exhibition to be hosted in Paris this summer.
The blend of art and science that cartography offers, can captivate minds of all ages. The March tour offered students who had already fallen in love with maps an ability to express their interest in new ways, while others were introduced for the first time to the beauty of a map.