Mapping the Way

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This two day workshop took place with year 8 pupils from St.Paul's Way Community School in Tower Hamlets, London. On each day we set out to map the school grounds by walking at the edges of footpaths and boundaries, around buildings, and along the painted lines of the playing field. When all the walks from both days were overlaid it produced a map composed of over 40 miles of tracks (left). It shows the overall accessible areas and details of the features within while the densities of lines destinguish the popular and unpopular places.

As the pupils walked along the edges of the school with GPS receivers their positions were
automatically recorded every two seconds for about an hour.

Back in the classroom we uploaded the GPS tracks and scrutintized them on a big screen.
We also had a large outline of the school drawn on the wall that we gradually filled in with
annotations and details of where things were.

Above is a selection of some of the individual maps made by the students.
We could see where they had mapped, and where they hadn't. We could also see where
they stopped to have a natter as it was represented as a cluster of small squiggles on the map.

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The reception of the GPS signals from the satellites wasn't always clear so some of the individual tracks weren't as precise as we hoped for.
When we combined all the tracks at the end of each day we produced a GPS map where the density of the lines defines the features of the area.

The workshop was part the Creative Mapping project by

GPS MAP OF ST. PAULS WAY COMMINITY SCHOOL - JULY 2007