Mission 2014 Field Trip: Using GPS in Sirsi

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Using GPS in Sirsi

Some of us were curious: where exactly are the places we are visiting this week? But it's difficult to chart our travels on a map, since the village of Hallusarige (population 194) is certainly not on your average map, and foreigners like us can't necessarily find the places we visited within the town of Sirsi. So, in order to help us locate some of these places, we are creating our own map of our trip. We're putting it together with the help of two GPS units that we carry along with us.

At each interesting site we visit, we place a marker on the GPS unit, and the device is able to tell us our exact coordinates. Then we post each place, and a picture of it, on the constantly-growing map of our trip, which is posted online. For example, when a village farmer showed us how he pollinates vanilla plants by hand, we marked that place and put it on the map. When we saw a biogas generator in the village, we put that on the map. And when we visited the bustling marketplace and the Hindu temple in Sirsi, we added those to our map as well.

Our map and photo collection will keep growing as we visit more places in and around the town of Sirsi. Check it out on the web! You can find it here.

-Kathryn

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About the Class

Mission 2014 is part of Terrascope, a learning program for MIT freshman. Each year the program begins with the class (12.000 Solving Complex Problems, Mission 201x). For this year their mission was to design a plan that will produce and distribute enough food to feed the planet over the next century, while ensuring that efficiency and equity are maximized with minimal disruption to the environment. With a world population of 9 billion expected by 2050 – and a billion people currently malnourished – we simply cannot continue with business as usual. An integrated cost-effective global strategy is needed to ensure sustainable and equitable food security. This must include a major re-thinking of agricultural practices as well as modifying the diets of much of the world's population. The students of 12.000 researched the problem and presented their solution in the form of a website as well as a public presentation followed by interrogation by a panel of experts. The website and presentation were a huge success.

About Terrascope

In the Spring semester many Terrascope students take part in one or more of three activities. These include: a hands-on class (1.016) where the students work on designing, building and implementing solutions to their problem; Terrascope Radio (SP360), where the students produce a series of radio programs on their topic including the field trip; and lastly the Terrascope field experience.

Each year alumni mentors play a very important part in the success of Terrascope. Many come to class and group meetings, communicate via email, and are generally extremely helpful if not a little bit jealous of being a MIT freshman! This year we are fortunate that three of our mentors are making the trip with us—Bob Gurnitz, Johnny Yang and Bhupendra Khetani

Acknowledgements

Many people have helped to make this trip possible. At Earthwatch the complex logistics have been coordinated by Grace Velardi and Alana Jones in the U.S. and the educational program by Rachel Batley in the U.K. At MIT our Terrascope administrator, Debra Aczel has spent countless hours guiding everyone through the acquisition of visas, answering many many questions, and remaining enthusiastic and upbeat. We all owe Debra a great deal of gratitude and hopefully the trip will go off flawlessly and she will be able to enjoy it and learn alongside the rest of us.

The trip this year is supported by the Baruch Foundation whose generosity ensures that another Terrascope class can take part in an international learning experience.