Jeykll Island Development Project

Wildcat Drafting is developing Jekyll Island!! Not really, but it's the basis for my Architecture and Civil Engineering Drawing class. The architecture students are working in groups of 4 to design state park rental cabins. There are several design specifications they have to meet. I decided to base this project on the real re-development proposals seen here. Although we're not doing it for real, we are using real guidelines to work from.

One of the new items for this year is that the group has to blog about their designs. Each group has created a blog and will post their designs and a weekly description of their work. Here are the groups: KALM Housing, Housing Enterprise, CMZ Designs and Valkova Architecture.

We started last Monday with a quick promo video I put together. It's not really what I wanted, but I ran out of time in preparing it. I wanted to draw the students into the project, give them a feel for the Island.

(11/05) I was able to get the promo video completed. Here's the new and improved version. Doesn't it make you want to design some cabins?


The students start out brainstorming and sketching possible designs. After a few revisions, they will develop the floor plans in AutoCAD Architecture. In order to involve the entire group in the designs, they will migrate the floor plans to regular AutoCAD and finish the rest of the project there. Then at the end of the semester they will present their design, along with a scale model, to a panel of professionals. It's a good learning project that involves lots of different skills.

I'll be sure to update as the semester progresses.

Student Sample GIS Project

I've been playing with a few GIS tools to see what we might could do in the Wildcat Drafting lab. This project involved taking student data and mapping their location. In itself, this could be easily done in Google Maps on a small scale. But I wanted to test something a little bigger.

I started by setting up a Google Doc's survey where students could enter their street address, class standing (Freshman, Soph., Jr. or Sr.) and whether they were a magnet student or not. I ask a few teachers in addition to myself to have their classes fill out the survey. I had hoped for around a hundred respondents. I got 27. Of those, I had to delete 14 due to faulty data. I mean, come on, nobody at WHS lives on Peachtree Road or has a zip code of 12345.

So, I had to work with the 13 lines of info that I had. I used GPS Visualizer to convert the street addresses to latitude/longitude. This site is pretty cool in that I could also create a Google Map or a Google Earth KMZ file for my data. But I wanted more than that. After the conversion, I opened the CSV file in MS Excel and saved it as a dBase database file. Then I imported it into ESRI's ArcMap and included a Cobb County map. I selected different colors for magnet and regular ed students and different shapes for class standing. Then I added some pretty stuff for the print-out and there it is. A bogus map of student distribution.

It's just a small way that we could use GIS as a planning tool. I could just as easily added public information such as home values, unemployment rate, median income or any number of census data items. Or even set up distances from WHS. Or calculated student density. Or .... you get the idea. The possibilities for GIS is almost unlimited.

Another "cool" tool at work in Wildcat Drafting.

iMapFlickr

I saw this app that takes geo-tagged images from your Flickr page and creates a Google Map of the images. Thought I would give it a try and see what happens. It did take a couple of tries to get the map size right so that it would fit within the borders of my blog.
I could see students using this to write about their vacation trip or maybe the journey of a book's character. Let me know what you think.

10/14/09 8:50 am
I just went online to check a blog posting and saw that the map wouldn't load. It wouldn't load for me on the iMapflickr site either. Not sure what the problem is. Here's a direct link to the map that you could try. This could be a Flickr issue or a Google map problem or maybe an iMapflickr hiccup. Not sure, but it was great while it lasted.