Skills Canada GIS Competitions for Secondary Students

Students who use Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in their learning gain important skills that can be used in the real world. These skills include critical thinking, spatial reasoning and collaboration. If you are currently using ArcGIS for Desktop in your teaching and you'd like to give your students a relevant experience, sign them up for the Skills Canada GIS Competition. Find out more about this annual competition held in Ontario and Manitoba in the spring.

Skills Canada hosts annual GIS competitions in Manitoba and Ontario that enable secondary students to showcase their GIS capabilities and challenge themselves in the process. Using ArcGIS for Desktop, students are given a real-world problem to solve.

Past competition questions include locating a provincial park, finding suitable forest stands for harvesting and selecting the best site for a mixed crop and livestock farm within 100km of a specified location.

In Ontario, competition judges include professionals who use GIS in their work and provide valuable feedback to the students during the evaluation process.

Students gain valuable experience tackling a real-world question at Skills Ontario.

Register your school board today:

• Manitoba Skills Competition - April 9, 2015
  Register before February 20, 2015. Check out last year’s scope for the GIS competition and find out what challenge the students faced.
• Ontario Skills Competition - May 5, 2015
  Register before March 1, 2015. For more information contact Barry Harrison at bharrison@skillsontario.com.
  Explore last year’s scope (Geographic Information Systems - Team of 2) and some of the previous competition questions.

Find free ArcGIS for Desktop tutorials on the Esri Canada Lesson Planner to prepare your students.

If you have any questions about the competitions, feel free to contact k12@esri.ca.