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GIS Day

This year's New Zealand GIS Awareness Day took place on Wednesday 5th August 2009 (as you know we have elected to hold our own NZ 'GIS Day' due to the fact that the International ESRI GIS day falls at a bad time for schools in New Zealand, during final exams).

This year we had a number of organisations getting involved and it was a great success!

Bay of Plenty Contribution

GIS Day celebrations in the Bay of Plenty were extended this year to include Rotorua and Tauranga High schools, as well as the Eastern Bay.

Workshops were offered to all high schools in the Bay of Plenty region. It was run over three days, in Rotorua on 4th, Whakatane on 5th and Tauranga on the 6th of August.

Students played the role of an Emergency Evacuation coordinator, and were responsible for evacuating residents in the Tauranga area, before an impending Tsunami struck.

A scenario was given where a tsunami was predicted to hit New Zealand in 16 hours. Using civil defence data, the students determined how many people there were to be evacuated, where the best evacuation routes were, and where to accommodate displaced residents.

But it wasn’t all plain sailing… a car accident and traffic congestion meant evacuation times had to be extended, and alternate evacuation plans had to be established- mid evacuation.

GIS Day is run annually by Environment Bay of Plenty to give students a hands-on introduction to GIS by giving them a chance to experience using GIS software, and get a glimpse of what it is capable of.

We had a nice successful GIS Day (jointly organised by the Department of Information Science and School of Surveying here), thanks for asking - feedback and vibe was good throughout the occasion.