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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:

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.

About the Author

Angela Alexander is a K-12 Education Specialist in the Esri Canada Education and Research group. She has over 15 years of experience working with educators across Canada. Angela focuses on producing geographic information system (GIS) and curriculum-specific resources, and conducting and creating custom workshops for educators. She manages the GIS Ambassador Program and is the Technical Chair for the annual Skills Ontario GIS competition. Angela also writes monthly posts for the Esri Canada Education and Research blog, highlighting K-12 educators and partners, new ArcGIS resources and GIS-related events.

Profile Photo of Angela Alexander