Teaching Cartography to Children Through Interactive Media - Maps for the Future Children Education and Internet - page 196

public on the university web site and dissemination seminars will be provided to
school teachers of the municipality.
16.1 Methodology
16.1.1 The Idea
“The classroom in a shoebox”: The idea appeared during the preparation of a model
of a classroom which was materialized in a shoebox. The model allowed the
visualization of the physical elements of a classroom according to a vertical spatial
projection.
The elements of a classroom in the first grades of the basic school are very
propitious to the project: they constitute significant fixed elements like the student
desks, the teacher desk, the blackboard, wall charts, the bookshelf, door and windows.
On the teacher desk we find a terrestrial globe, books, pieces of chalk, a cleaner. On
the sideboard in the corner, we find a small museum nearby an aquarium. Based on
these elements, other icons will be presented and activated in the media.
The activity will be developed based on the classroom. Before to arrive, in the
classroom other scales are presented, as the building of a mental city map, the
arrival at school and finally the classroom.
For this purpose, many proposals were suggested and selected (Nogueira 2009 ).
A bibliography specialized in school cartography was consulted and surveys of
electronic games were necessary to perform the different stages of the media
(Pontuschka et al. 2007 ).
The presentation of the activity begins with a sketch drawn by a child (mental
map) symbolizing the way from home to school. In a second moment we see a bus
passing in the school street (Fig. 16.1 ). It stops and a child gets out. He goes until
the pedestrian crossing and waits for the green light to cross. He is now just at the
entry of the school. During these stages, we see several situations that help in
acquiring knowledge. The teacher will be able to treat several aspects of localiza-
tion, orientation, and space with his pupils. He will also deal with the location of the
school in the district, the orientation of space according to the pupil's home and the
representation of the near space related to the far space. All different special points
nearby the school will be observed and lived in the media.
16.1.2 Organization and List of the Themes
The themes selected for the media are: the Earth references, the rotation and
translation of Earth, the orientation with the compass, the cartographic and histori-
cal representations of Niter ´ i, the landscape, the coastal fauna and environment.