Kids Explore Real-World Engineering

[Editor’s Note: Be sure to check back one week from today for a very special, related announcement!] This past December, National Geographic Education staff were invited to travel to Beijing, China to participate in the first-ever Destination Imagination Asia Pacific Beijing Invitational. Five countries and 26 Chinese provinces were represented at the event. Forty teams, each made up of six to eight students, were challenged with … Continue reading Kids Explore Real-World Engineering

MapMaker Interactive Part 2: East Asia at Night

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China highlighted in MapMaker Interactive. If you can’t have trouble reading the labels, the red line is the approximate area of Tibet, and the brown area points to Lhasa. The yellow label on the top right identifies Beijing

In the last post we started using MapMaker Interactive– a free mapping tool on the National Geographic Education website– to explore just two of its thematic layers: Lights at Night and Population Density. As promised, this post will take you to deeper into the data to show how MapMaker can reveal patterns, anomalies, and–I would argue–stories about the planet and the people on it. 
Now, scroll over to East Asia. First, look at the Lights at Night layer and quiz yourself: What is that isolated bright dot in southwestern China? If you guessed it is the lights of Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, you’re correct. The city has been heavily developed by the Chinese government in recent years. For more, see these articles on the Tibetan railway by the BBC and China’s Xinhua (disclaimer: Xinhua is a government-run news source).

Continue reading “MapMaker Interactive Part 2: East Asia at Night”