Nelson / Geography 582

Incorporating High Performance Computing into the Undergraduate Curricula

Automated Cartography & Object-oriented Programming for Geographic Information S ystems

Geography 582/Computer Science 596

Course Goal The goal of this jointly taught class is to introduce the concepts of spatial programming to undergraduate students in geography and computer science. Last spring, Geography and Computer Science forged an informal partnership to facilitate this move. We agreed to team-teach a course this fall that would serve as an initial bridging environment for developing additional courses that incorporate the high-performance computing skills and technologies. As a first step, this course has been designed meet three objectives.

These are to teach the student the following:

1) basic programming skills,
2) basic cartographic concepts, and
3) how to use this information to computationally solve some of the simpler cartographic design issues that many geographic information systems do not specifically address.

Progress At the mid-point of the semester, we have covered the basics of programming using JAVA and examined several pertinent cartographic concepts through lectures and lab exercises that use ArcView. The last half the semester will be devoted to learning the scripting language upon which ArcView is built, Avenue. Students will be using Avenue to customize the ArcView environment and to enhance the cartographic design capabilities of ArcView.