Description
Rising population has been one of the biggest challenges over few decades, and it has been affecting almost everything from the tillable land, rain forests, and metallic ores to the current job situation, the crime rate and the current economy. There are various reasons for population growth like lack of birth control and cultural traditions in less developed countries, increased longevity and medical advances in developed countries to name a few. We need to talk about this (population growth) serious challenge to the younger generation and make them aware of what is going on around them and start educating them so that when they grow up they don't end up making the mistakes their elders have done. We don't want a day when we have to go the museum to see a piece of coal or pictures of forests. My thesis focuses on the above topic of population growth but locally on some of the major cities in the United States of America and more locally on the county of San Diego's crime rate which is one of the effects of population growth. It has been developed as a teaching aid for one of the geography teachers at Helix Charter High School who can also do some analysis on San Diego using the tool apart from just population and crime rate information. Data and numbers might not make much sense when shown just on a piece of paper or a text file, instead if it is put into some kind of pictorial form it would definitely grab more attention. Technology has advanced so much in the past few decades and there are so many tools out there which can process the output to produce a nice pictorial representation of the data which has been fed. Students can be kept interested in the topic by showing the changes in the population via a graph or a picture and the teacher can talk about the factors influencing the changes in the population. GIS (Geographic Information System) has been on the rise for the last two decades and is a mixture of geography and computer technology. It has been used to make web maps interactive and interesting. GIS allows us to analyze, understand, and visualize data in many ways. Most GIS software available is expensive and many schools don't feel like spending much or might not have funds. The teacher and the students will get their hands on a product or tool which is state of the art.
