The contest, Maps Tell the Story: Plan for the Future, gave students an opportunity to investigate how maps can be used to plan for the future of their towns.

Wendy Harrington’s class divided into three small groups that worked on a poster, a podcast or a PowerPoint project. Together the class walked through Milton and learned about the historic buildings.

Brendon Garber, Jason Williams and Brandon Ware worked on the poster entry, which won first place. “We went through Milton, took pictures and compared them to old pictures of Milton,” said Williams. The three students then drew a map of the Milton area and included the old and new pictures of important landmarks.

Logan Ritenhour, A’liyah Oglesby, Claire Denney and Anthony Moore won the first-place award for their podcast entry. “We started out writing about Milton, and then we took pictures and put them all together in the podcast,” Oglesby said. “We put our voices in with the map and talked about the pictures.”

The PowerPoint project created by Ronan Dutton, Kyle Martini and Tyrone Giddens won an honorable mention. “My favorite place in Milton was the old church that was made into the Lydia B. Cannon Museum,” said Martini.

Harrington’s students worked on entries for the Delaware Geographic Information Systems (GIS) contest throughout the fall, and all three projects were selected as finalists.

Finalists throughout the state for each category were presented at the Delaware GIS 2010 Conference on Feb. 10 at the Sheraton Conference Center in Dover. Attendees judged the finalist entries based on creativity, research content and overall portrayal of the information.

The first-place winners from each grade and category received prizes and their teacher received a complimentary registration to next year’s Delaware GIS Conference. All finalist entries can be found on degis.org