Guest Blogger: Cian Gargan

On three mornings in October Ciarán Staunton and Dave Corley came to Portmarnock Community School to get us involved in the project called #MapLesotho. This project is related to the work of Action Ireland Trust.The aim of the project is to map the country Lesotho in openstreetmap because their maps have very little detail. We can use the information we have created to estimate things like population density. This will give Lesotho an idea of the need for facilities, for example like Hospitals or Schools. We all had great fun learning how to map.

[caption id=”attachment_158” align=”aligncenter” width=”145” class=” “] Cian Gargan, Portmarnock Community College[/caption]

At first we used a software called ID editor which was great for basic work. It enabled us to do things like create roads, residential areas, rivers and houses. After a while we started to use more complicated software like JOSM, which is downloaded software that has lots of short cuts which helps us work twice as fast to get even more mapping done.

[caption id=”attachment_150” align=”aligncenter” width=”235” class=” “] Working away at #MapLesotho[/caption]

We have all had great fun during the last few weeks mapping Lesotho and we can’t wait for the next few classes. It has been a great learning experience. The things we learned are all things we cover in our classwork, for example the difference between lines, points and polygons is something covered in geometry. Our Geography knowledge of Africa is also increased in the conversations we had with the trainers and our teacher Niall FitzGerald who likes Lesotho. My class keep mapping in our free class time and some of us do mapping at home.