Welcome to our 2021 Virtual DE GMU Independent Science Research and JMU Geospatial Symposia webpage. We are excited that even in these extraordinary times, our amazing students will be able to share their work with our university partners (George Mason University and James Madison University), LCPS, and our community. Within these pages you will find the products our students have produced during the 2020-21 school year as part of their Independent Science Research class or Geospatial class.
JMU Geospatial Symposium
Geospatial Science is a dual-enrollment course through James Madison University’s (JMU) Geospatial Semester. Students who take this course are high school juniors and seniors representing 11 of Loudoun’s high schools. Since 2006, the Geospatial Science course has provided an opportunity for students to learn emerging workforce skills in the fields of Geospatial Information Systems, Remote Sensing, and Global Positioning Systems. Development of these skills require students to think critically, problem-solve, collaborate with peers, and communicate their results with their peers and the community. The JMU Geospatial Semester program is one of only a few in the country that provide high school students with this opportunity. Alumni from this program have gone on to receive summer internships, college degrees in GIS, careers utilizing GIS, and job assignments in the military.
Each year, students complete a final project on a topic of their choosing, which are designed to connect students, technology, and their community. In the past, students would travel to James Madison University to present their work to faculty as well as displayed at events such as the Loudoun GIS Forum and the ESRI User Conference Map Gallery. Due to the circumstances this year, students will only presenting their work to the community virtually here on the symposia website. For their projects, students utilized ESRI products such as ArcGIS Online and ArcPro for their analysis. Students were asked to create an ArcGIS StoryMap presentation of their work. ArcGIS StoryMaps is an immersive presentation that include text, graphics, videos and interactive maps. Additionally, student created a video presentation explaining their project.
GMU Independent Science Research Symposium
Independent Science Research (ISR) is either dual-enrollment course through George Mason University (GMU) or an LCPS honors course (no dual enrollment credit). In 2021, ISR was offered to high school juniors an and seniors from 13 of Loudoun's high schools with an enrollment of over 300 students. Students taking the course develop a deeper understanding of the science or engineering process by undertaking an authentic science or engineering project. Students identify a research or engineering question by summarizing the literature, design an investigation to answer the research question, and collect and analyze the data to answer the research question. The culmination of this work is a professional communication that includes a presentation as well as a paper.
Some ISR students may be chosen by their school to compete in the LCPS Regional Science and Engineering Fair (RSEF) by presenting their presentations. However, all ISR students present their work as part of the GMU/LCPS ISR symposium. This event usually occurs at GMU with students presenting their work to each other as well as to GMU undergraduates, graduates, and faculty. Due to the pandemic, students are only presenting their work virtually through this website, rather than in-person.
With guidance from their teacher, students self-selected into a category established for the Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair. Each project is assigned an identifying project number that is used in the name of the files they submitted. Each student submitted three PDF documents.
A poster of their project
A quad chart providing an overview of their project in a single slide, AND
A slide with a link to a short, narrated slide presentation highlighting the major points of the project.