The ability to orient oneself and read maps is essential to successfully navigate in unfamiliar environments. It is well known that the ability to orient oneself with maps varies from person to person. While there are numerous navigation systems to help us find our way, very few efforts have been made to use GI technologies to promote orientation and map reading skills and overcome the individual differences. GeoGami is a location-based game using digital maps to systematically teach navigational map reading competence.

The thesis will investigate how to design trainings to promote people’s navigational map reading competence with digital maps. Successful map reading relies on the ability to localize yourself on the map, to localize objects on the map and to align the map with your environment. You will design tasks to practise these competences at different levels of difficulty. These trainings can be either conducted in the real world or in virtual worlds explicitly designed for these trainings. You will run a study testing your trainings to identify the most efficient ways to teach navigational map reading.

Literature:

Lobben, A. K. (2007). Navigational map reading: Predicting performance and   identifying relative influence of map-related abilities. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 97(1), 64–85. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8306.2007.00524.x

J Bistron, A Schwering (2023): Assessing navigational map reading competencies with the location-based GeoGame “GeoGami”, Journal of Geoscience education 72 (1), 73-85, https://doi.org/10.1080/10899995.2023.2190830