Computerized simulations for geography instruction: sense of place

Sense of Place is a Project GeoSim educational software module focusing on U.S. states and counties. A comprehensive statistical database is combined with a set of simple visualization techniques to allow geography students to gain an understanding of the characteristics of states and counties. Students can examine data for anyone of the statistical variables in the database. In addition, students can create me tries consisting of target values for several variables, and rate counties or states by how closely their data match the targets. Symbolic mapping is used to illustrate spatial characteristics of a state or county, such as its size, shape, and location, as well as regional patterns among different states and counties. Graphing is used to illustrate basic concepts of data distributions and to depict the distributions of specific variables. A spreadsheet is used to view the multivariate data sets created by user metrics. These visualization techniques and the graphical user interface tools required to control them are incorporated into interchangeable "views". This approach allows additional views to be added to Sense of Place in the future.