The Individuals and Societies Department honoured an invitation to celebrate this year’s World Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Day. The program was organised by AccuGeospatial, an Esri Business Partner and hosted by SOSHGIC in Tema on Wednesday, 13 November 2019. The day was celebrated with the theme, GIS: An Essential Tool for Critical Thinking.

As part of the program, students from SOSHGIC and TIS were tasked to present one project each that seeks to address a critical developmental issue and also use relevant geospatial technology to communicate this issue. The methodology used was expected to be rigorous enough to demonstrate excellence and innovation in applying Geographic Information Science and Technology. Tema International School was proudly represented by two MYP5 Geography students, Elorm Godzi and Rudolf Dogbegah. They developed a project on the topic, “Using ArcGIS to investigate the trends in the spatial distribution of the world’s Mega Cities”. Elorm and Rudolf were able to use the Web App Builder for ArcGIS to build a two-dimensional web app that illustrated how the global distribution of mega cities has changed over the past 60 years and also made some projection into the next 20 years. The project was reviewed by a panel of three distinguished judges with extensive working experience in the use of GIS technology. At the end of the contest, the Department is proud to inform the school community that the Tema International School team was declared the winner of the 2019 World GIS Day Inter-Schools Project Competition. Each presenter received an award of a smart mobile device that will help capture and edit GIS data. The presenter from each school also received a certificate and an ArcGIS 1-year student license for their personal use. In addition, Tema International School received a plaque for winning the competition. Congratulations to Elorm, Rudolf, and the supporting team. You did it and we are very proud of you!

The Individuals and Societies Department wish to express our heartfelt appreciation to ACCU Geospatial team for introducing our students to the use of Geographic information systems. We are particularly grateful to Stephen Afriyie, the Geo-mentor assigned to the TIS team. The MYP Geography class is grateful to the Principal of our dear school, Dr Ken Darvall, for granting us permission to participate in the celebration of the GIS day. ~Dr. Michael Odame (MYP 5 Geography Teacher)

Reflections from the winning presenters

We had a trip to SOS-HGIC to celebrate GIS (Geographical Information System) Day. Rudolph and I gave a presentation on a Web Map Application we had created. TIS ended up winning the competition against SOSHGIC. The competition was an insightful experience for me. From this competition, I had the opportunity to improve my communication and self-management skills because we had to organise our presentation and Web Map Application within a very short period of time. We were given just about 72 hours to organise our project.
From the presentation also given by others I also got to learn more about the GIS Day. ~Elorm Godzi

To celebrate GIS Day there was an Inter-Schools’ project for students to speak about an important topic and effectively use geospatial technology to analyse data. The project we chose was on urbanisation at the global scale. We looked in detailed how urbanisation is spreading over the years. We were able to achieve our goal of making Tema International School win the trophy. The TIS team was supported by Kelvin Ahiakpor, Richard Tetteh Agbemador and Araba Egei-Mensah. With the help of the knowledge acquired from the MYP Geography lessons, we were able to formulate a research question to guide us in our investigations.

Preparation for this event was quite a challenging task for me because we entered the competition at very short notice but we decided to take the risk to participate. This competition enhanced my public speaking skills, research ability and played a significant role in my development of a growth mindset because when the judges gave their opinions on our presentation I took it in good faith as a way of developing myself. ~Rudolf Dogbegah