Quantity Over Quality? Teaching Cartography Through the 30 Day Map Challenge

Abstract

I used the 30 Day Map Challenge as a framework to structure my Spring 2023 Cartography and Visualization community college course. Students were tasked with a new mapping assignment following the themes of the Map Challenge to complete during each class meeting throughout the semester, as an alternative to a more traditional project-based lab structure. I sequenced lecture topics to accompany and elucidate the Map Challenge prompts, and used Socratic prompts on Google Jamboard slides to spur collaborative class discussions. As a whole, the ten-student class completed 80% of submissions for 27 required mapping prompts, submitting a total of 218 maps that fulfilled the prompts. Short, thematic mapping activities entailed greater repetition of software workflows as well as more opportunities for independent problem solving.