Cartographic Response to Changes in Teaching Geography and History - Maps for the Future Children Education and Internet - page 215

￿ Clear general geographical base: only the biggest rivers and those relevant to the
topic are represented, and relief shading has replaced a lot of mountain names;
￿ Different representation of one and the same theme for the different school
years: maps and atlases compiled for higher classes have richer content of the
topics;
￿ Not so many symbols are represented in the general legend (only the most
associative ones, such as the symbols representing state border, city, capital,
etc.).
The new philosophy of atlas compiling is related to the representation of specific
themes in the Atlases. Such a theme is the Trojan War, which is not represented in
the old atlases. The maps is based on the information taken from Homer's poem
“Iliad”. The result is shown by Fig. 17.9 .
The existing maps representing the Trojan War did not provide us with the
necessary information. The war was only partly represented or with insufficient
information. The explanations in textbooks should be expanded with descriptions
taken from literature. The teachers are very positively surprised when they receive
such maps that they use to visualize their explanations.
Other new topics in the historical atlases are related to modern history. Brigade
movement is one of the topics that are newly developed. These new maps re-group
the distribution, and the localization of different meetings, grouping activities,
protests and others are represented. The pupils visualize the topics and they can
use the maps to connect history lessons to situational facts.
17.4 Conclusions and Directions for Future Work
The idea of this research was to find topics in the school curriculum of geography
and history, where cartographers should quickly react. The best solution is when the
people in the responsible ministries react also in time and do not take a year or
more. However, if it is not possible, cartographers could propose some new themes
as additional topics. This is allowed because about 20% of the content of school
atlases should contain information that are not included in the school textbooks.
The most important topics in these days are responding crises and disaster manage-
ment. In the new Bulgarian atlases of geography some maps of these themes have
already been compiled.
If electronic variants of the atlases are produced, the updating and including of
the new themes will be easy and faster. The main problem for countries like
Bulgaria is the limited availability of computers in geography and history classes
in schools. The computer labs are occupied by the lessons of electronic sciences and
informatics. Teachers do not have the opportunity to use them, but pupils could use
such atlases for homework and studying.
To help teachers in difficult topics, cartographers could be ready to supply them
with additional materials, maps, and other cartographic products. Such example is