Geographies OF AMK

From satellite imageries, remotely sensed multi spectral imagery, to interactive vector-based visualisations, these carefully curated geospatial datasets explore the personal geographies of students and help them to re-imagine spaces using GIS.

Changes in AMK South between 2009 and 2019

• Google Earth Imagery and Planet Earth imagery were projected on ArcGIS Pro and published on ArcGIS Online.

• Storymap Swipe App was deployed to compare what AMK South was like in 2009 and 2019.

During the lesson, the following questions were asked to facilitate learning:

• Study both maps: Can you spot at least 3 changes in AMK South? Describe these changes.

• Study the changes: Where are these changes most concentrated at?

• Do these changes benefit residents in AMK South? Why do you think so?

Depiction of AMK South on Social Media

• Relevant social media posts about AMK South were duplicated on ArcGIS Pro (date posted, title, caption, location, user) and geocoded. The actual social media contents were hosted on Google Drive. Careful consideration was placed to ensure that there is a range of different posts covering different age groups or different types of experiences.

• Three concentric circles were designed using Military Tools for ArcGIS and they are spaced apart (400m, 1000m and 2000m) for students to study the distribution of social media activities.

During the lesson, the following questions were asked to facilitate learning:

• How are the social media posts distributed within 400m, 1000m and 2000m from St Nicholas Girls' School? Can you suggest some reasons why this is the case?

• Where would you find positive and negative social media posts in AMK South? Can you find any place-pattern?

• Have you had any similar encounters as shown in the social media posts?

Where people go to eat in AMK South

• Service Area Tool on ArcGIS Pro was used to create the walking-time polygons of each hawker centre. 3 classes of polygons were created: Between 0 and 5 minutes, Between 5 and 10 minutes, more than 10 minutes.

• Chart Symbology Tool was used to represent the type of food at each hawker centres. Bar chart was selected to show the number of each type of food options: Halal, Non-halal and vegetarian.

During the lesson, the following questions were asked to facilitate learning:

• Can you guess how many hawker centres are there in AMK South? How is this map different/similar from what you originally thought?

• What is the distribution of hawker centres in AMK South?

• How are the number of hawker centre distributed within 1km, 2km and 3km from our school?

• Which hawker centre is easiest to get to from our school?

• Is it easy for residents in AMK south to get to a hawker centre?

Green cover in AMK South

• Planet.com provided a high-resolution multispectral imagery of AMK South for the purpose of this workshop. The normalised difference vegetation index was calculated to analyse the distribution of green cover in AMK South. Vegetated areas were coloured green, while non-vegetated areas were coloured yellow.

• A fishnet was created, and each square box was coloured green if at least one street tree was present in the area. Otherwise, it was coloured yellow.

During the lesson, the following questions were asked to facilitate learning:

• What does 'nature' in Singapore mean to you?

• Do you know of any 'nature' places in AMK South? Can you name some of them?

• Compare some of the representations of nature on the map: Which representation do you think would be a more accurate reflection of nature in AMK South?

Background

“See What Others Cannot | Rediscovering Ang Mo Kio using Digital Maps” is a GIS workshop organised for students of CHIJ St. Nicholas Girls School (CHIJ SNGS). Through a range of bespoke GIS web apps, each lesson focuses on exploring representations of students' personal geographies in digital maps. If you are interested to learn more about how these webapps were used to facilitate geography lessons, you may view the following videos.