On Thursday the 16th #MapLesotho came to Portmarnock Community College where a mixture of the Transition Year and Fifth Year students started to use openstreetmap (osm) to #MapLesotho. Portmarnock Community College is the home of Action Ireland Trust.

This was in fact the second time the students had contact with openstreetmap. Ciarán Staunton had visited the previous week to help set up accounts and establish the basic tasks of mapping roads, tracks, rivers and villages with the Rural HOTOSM Task.

Now the class took on the challenge of trying to map faster and to sample the JOSM environment which allows speed and has the advantage of working offline once downloaded, unlike the ID editors which can stop working if the internet goes down (and it did!). To support the use of JOSM Dave Corley asked a number of students to download it and try doing the edits. The results were a great success, within 10 minutes one machine had produced 390 nodes. As a group the pupils completed another 15 tiles in the room, and several afterwards as some took the work home. The OSM stats for the 9th and the 16th show a massive lift to approx 20,000 nodes each day. Dave was enthused at how fast some of the young people took to JOSM.

[caption id=”attachment_148” align=”aligncenter” width=”457” class=” “] New OSM users with Stephen Peppard, Niall FitzGerald and Dave Corley.[/caption]

Anyone visiting the school encounters Niall FitzGerald, the Vice Principal. Niall is passionate about teaching his pupils to learn skills in order to put them into the service of others. Niall takes the opportunity to help Lesotho whenever he can. A perfect fit with young people learning the values and objectives of openstreetmap.