Assignment 3

Casey Conner

The overview of many of the general applications of ArcMap was very insightful. The capabilities of ArcMap are incredible. Learning the georeferencing and control points were difficult but impressive when the two style maps meshed together. Overall this was assignment was a very good challenge. One detail that I noticed in doing this assignment was the fact that sometimes the location of the trees in the database did not exactly matchup with the locations on Google Earth. This made the fencing portion of the assignment slightly more difficult to attempt to get the fencing around the actual tree, rather than the location that the database suggested.

I believe that this assignment was good in regards to learning how complex GIS and accurate mapmaking really is. I feel like I learned this information really well because I had to repeat my work so many times. I feel that repeating these steps sometimes two or three times was very helpful in learning the little nuances and ‘tricks’ in ArcMap. This assignment was also very frustrating at times because I felt like the instructions were not very clear. I think the instructions could have been a little more clear while not making the assignment too easy.

I felt like this assignment was very good for blending ArcMap and Google Earth together, which was very neat and could potentially be very helpful applied “in the real world”. I have used Google Earth for a couple of years but have never used it in the way that was required by this assignment. This leads me to believe that there must be even more very useful tools to uncover with this program.

The only improvement that I can think of would be to somehow use this technology and apply it to an area or areas that would be familiar to the student. I don’t know if this would be possible because of the very detailed instructions that are necessary for an assignment like this, but this would possibly make this assignment more applicable to each student’s job. I will say that even though I am several hours away from campus I feel that I have gained a very good idea of how campus is laid out.