education

We have partnered with EUthmappers, a project funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union and supported by Politecnico di Milano, Italy, to advance the goal to enhance Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) knowledge in secondary schools in Europe by training teachers and students on collaborative geospatial information.

The UN Maps project (initially called Unite Maps) was born in 2019, and the following year included training activities aimed at educating or empowering OSM communities to subsequently support the project in its mapping activities in support of partner peacekeeping missions. Over these four years, the UN Maps crowdsourcing team has organized nearly 40 workshops for about 1,200 people from a wide range of groups and communities, in five different languages: English, Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese.

A group of students enrolled in the Erasmus Mundus Master’s program in Geospatial Technologies at the University of Jaume I (UJI) in Castellón de la Plana, Spain, as part of their final class exercises for the course “Spatial Data Services,Sources,Standards and Infrastructures” analysed campus safety and identified vulnerabilities mapping campus streetlights, utilizing open data and GIS software.

Located in the heart of Yaounde, Cameroon, is the ENSTP (National Advanced School of Public Works). This school provides training for engineers in different fields such as Civil Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Town Planning, Architecture and Land Surveys. The students here are introduced to concepts like topography, geodesy, projections, cartography, GIS and sustainable development. These make the student community in this school a target of high potential as concerns initiation to participative mapping.

Lodz, Poland. On November 30, members of the OSM Polska Association, together with students of the Faculty of Geographical Sciences of the University of Lodz and supporters of the OpenStreetMap (OSM) project, for a total of 38 participants, met in the halls of the university to support the activities of UN Mappers and help them create maps of areas where United Nations humanitarian missions are carried out . Over the course of two and a half hours, the volunteers focused their efforts on mapping areas in a remote region of Somalia.

Last month, the UN Mappers team carried out a series of activities in the Valencian Community, Spain, with the dual purpose of raising awareness of the UN Maps universe and training participants in the use of OpenStreetMap open data. Two prestigious universities, Universidad Jaime I (UJI) in Castellón and Universidad Politécnica de Valencia (UPV), and secondary school students from the Entrenaranjos International School, were involved.