Could Your Tree Be a Map Symbol?

If you have colleagues who are also playing this game ask if you can take a look at their images of trees or ask some friends to email you their best drawing of a tree - have you all picked out the same features? Do they all look the same?

Now compare your drawing to the symbols used within Digimap for Schools. The first image is from the OS MasterMap Topographical Layer maps (zoom level 11 in the service):

This image shows groupings of trees from the OS 1:50,000 Landranger Series (zoom level 6 in the service) :

How do your handdrawn images compare? Do your drawings and the symbols look similar?

When you see how real images of trees have been converted into simplified symbols can you see opportunities for classroom discussion about how we represent features every day and the categories we choose to simplify things into to make symbols work? Are there signs in the classroom that you could discuss and compare with their real counterparts? What are the implications of the symbols we use in this way?

Once you have either thought of lots of great classroom activities around symbols: click here to continue...