Twenty Lower Dauphin High School (LDHS) students attended the third annual Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Day at Harrisburg University of Science and Technology on Nov. 16. The daylong GIS Day, offered in-person and online, is geared toward anyone with an interest in geospatial technology.

The Lower Dauphin participants were Riana Agili-Shaban, Thomas Campbell, Abigail Carter, Liam Carver, Neyten Diaz, Dylan Robinson, Maximus Ford, Nick Haslup, Abdi Henry, Antonio Mardegain, Elijah Nalesnik, Logan Pedersen, Jesse Reigle, Makenna Robinson, Bella Roeting, Ashley Sather, Tanmay Singh, Marshal Stahl, Emmanuel Weese, and Wil Sierer. The faculty advisers on the trip were Elizabeth Kirman, Amber Doran, and Nancy Kiscadden.

While at the celebration of GIS, the students heard from Emily Mercurio, the CEO and co-founder of CivicMapper, a geospatial technology development company that uses modern mapping technologies to solve a variety of issues. They also attended sessions about using geospatial applications, lidar point cloud data, Google Maps, and the building blocks of spatial data science. The event also featured hands-on activities, such as drone flight demonstrations for high-schoolers, along with hands-on GIS and mapping activities.

This year marked the fourth time Harrisburg University had hosted the event, which is co-sponsored by the commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The university is slated to host the 2023 event as well, with the set date of Wednesday, Nov. 15. To learn more, visit https://summits.harrisburgu.edu/gis/.