Geography

For successful completion of this assignment follow the
steps listed below. The assignment is made up of two parts.
Part A will introduce you to Google Earth. Part B will
involve writing a short essay based on your Google Earth
work and a writing prompt (max 200 words). You will submit
this using Gradient, which is Purdue’s online peer
calibration tool. In Gradient you will then learn how to
evaluate writing (the calibration step), and then review
the writing of three other students and your own writing.
We will use Google Earth and Gradient a lot in this course,
so this introduction is intended to make sure you are up to
speed with these important tools.
Part A – Google Earth Basics
1. Begin by downloading Google Earth and watch the
tutorials on navigation, searching for places and drawing
and measuring.
2. Make sure you understand how you navigate in Google
Earth using the mouse, fly-to panel and the navigation
controls. Once you are familiar with this, navigate to a
place (e.g., house, neighborhood or apartment building)
that you lived in as a child. In the rest of these
instructions we will call this your “childhood home”.
3. As described in the tutorials there are different
ways of doing this. If you know the coordinates of a
location such as your childhood home you can insert them in
to the fly-to panel, or if you know the address you can
enter this. If you still can’t find the place you are
looking for then try a combination of either interpreting
the satellite imagery or using different combinations of an
address. Usually it works if you type country, zip code,
street number and street name in the fly-to panel,
separated by comma.
4. Check the elevation of your childhood home. At the
bottom of the screen you will see information, such as;
Imagery Date, elevation and eye altitude.
5. Once you have located your childhood home then next
zoom out so that you can view the greater surrounding
community. Find the closest town or city center and record
its geographic coordinates by adding a place mark using the
[add place mark tool]. Name the place mark “my home town”.
6. Write down the coordinates as decimal degrees (e.g.
10.134567°), decimal degree/minutes (e.g. 10° 8.07402’) and
decimal degree/minute/seconds (e.g. 10° 8’ 4.4412’’). You
can calculate the conversions yourself, or change the [Show
lat/long setting] under preferences (Mac users) or settings
(PC users). Coordinates are viewed in the bottom corner of
the screen.
7. Use the [ruler tool] and measure the distance between
the “my home town” placemark and the school you attended
when you lived there (or any nearby school).
8. Now use the [add path tool] and create the path to go
from “my home town” to the school.
9. Finally, explore the area surrounding your childhood
home using Google Earth as you work on Part B in Gradient.
Part 2 – Gradient
Not sure what Gradient is, or how it works – please watch the video in the
Questions and Answers section of the course blackboard site before you do any
more of this assignment!
In a well-written and concise manner (max 200 words for everything you type in
to gradient, minimum 100 words) write a paragraph that answers the question
below.
Question: Every place occupies a unique location or position on Earth’s surface.
Geographers can describe the location of a place by site, which is the physical
character of a place. Where in the world is your childhood home (from
Part A) located and what can you say about the physical character of
this site? Specifically discuss topography (e.g. flat, hilly, alpine?), land use
(e.g. forest, agriculture, wetland, town/city etc.?), water sources (e.g. rivers,
lakes, oceans?) and climate (e.g. warm, cold, wet, dry, windy etc?) of this site.
You do not need to include all of the information you collected in part A, but you
can use some of it.
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