The CAD lab, one of the electives in the 12th year, requires seniors to do an independent project. A team of teachers is working on plans to vertically integrate GIS into the curriculum. Next year, NASA's Lewis and Clark satellites will provide spectral data for any requested area in Fairfax County. The data will be used to determine the percentage of permeable watershed in the area. Challenges Jones acknowledged that building support for the program has not been an easy task.
People look at it largely as a hardware-software kind of thing.
If they are familiar with GIS at all, they're imagining something in their automobiles that someday will be able to tell them where they are. He said one of the goals of the school is to create better community understanding of GIS and its importance as an educational tool. We have sent faculty and students far and wide to share their work, to say to people, this is an area that all of us need to attend to. We're just beginning to understand the power of being able to look at multivariate and dynamic systems, and do computational modeling in science that will allow us to ask questions we have never before been able to ask. It is going to change the way we think.