ArcGIS Storymap Competition
For Delaware High School and Middle School Students
The Delaware Department of Education (DDOE) and the Delaware Geospatial Education community encourage interested students to participate in this year’s ArcGIS StoryMap competition.
The 2026 competition has a new theme! This year high school and middle school students are asked to select and explore an aspect of sustainability. Using maps, images, and narrative, storymap competition participants will investigate the topic of sustainability and use their storymap to present ideas for addressing a sustainability challenge in their community.
The ArcGIS student contest is open to High School (“HS”, grade 9-12) and Middle School (“MS,” grade 5-8) students who can analyze, interpret, and present data using an ArcGIS storymap. The highest scoring storymaps at the middle school level and at the high school level will be awarded prizes and recognized by the Delaware Secretary of Education at an awards ceremony in June 2026. See the 2026 storymap flyer for more information.
Check out the University of Delaware’s 2026 ArcGIS StoryMap blog.
Congratulations to Delaware’s 2024 Winners
High School Winners
Chanel Beck – First Place
Brandywine High School
“The Delaware Indians”: The First People of the First State
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Natalie Lewis – Second Place
Caesar Rodney High School
Harriet Tubman’s Underground Railroad
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Levi Levine – Third Place
3 – High School – Brandywine HS
Horseshoe Crabs: Delaware’s Most Helpful Living Fossil
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Hudson Dooley – Fourth Place
Charter School of Wilmington
Understanding State Immigration and Refugees
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Caleb Comley and Alexander Bovell – Fifth Place
Charter School of Wilmington
Educational Attainment in Wilmington
Middle School Winners
Eric Lewis – First Place
Home School
The DuPont Family in Delaware
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Katia Smith – Second Place
Christiana Honors Academy
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Natalia Smith – Third Place
Christiana Honors Academy
The Inside Scoop: The Ice Cream Shops of Delaware
Honorable Mentions
Parker Cuff – Honorable Mention
Cab Calloway School of the Arts
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Elliott Warburton & Rita Nyamikah – Honorable Mention
AI Dupont High School
Evolution of AI Dupont Feeder Pattern
Previous Winners
Details and Resources
Entries
Entering the contest
All entries will be judged by GIS professionals in the State of Delaware using the rubric below. To qualify for judging, all entries must be submitted by the posted deadline. Participants must also complete a permission (media release) form.
Entries must
- Be an original work by students that is conceived, created, and completed entirely by the student(s) submitting the entry.
- Identify and explore a sustainability issue. Possible topics might include:
- Climate change and how it affects people and places
- Clean water and how we use or protect it
- Food production, farming, and access to healthy food
- Renewable energy (solar, wind, etc.) and who has access
- How cities grow, how they manage transportation, and green spaces
- Trash, recycling, and reducing waste
- Protecting plants, animals, and natural habitats
Students should limit the focus of their sustainability topic to the scale of their school, community, state, or country.
- Be in the form of an ArcGIS StoryMap.
- Be visible to the judges without requiring a login (the storymap must be published).
- Be a “map-centric” exploration, analysis, and presentation of a geographic phenomenon. The use of “non-map visuals” (images and videos) are acceptable but should be limited. Exceeding the limits of ‘non-map visuals’ means a “progressive reduction in judged score”. The limits are:
- total of up to 60 seconds of video, and
- total of up to two images not created by the project author (e.g., 1 historic portrait photo plus 1 historic landscape photo), and
- total of up to five images created by the project author (replication of project maps as smaller/thumbnail images, and items visible as popups within interactive maps, do not count against these image limits).
- Provide “short URL” format (e.g. “http://arcg.is/1A2b3xyz”) for storymap submission
- Provide a separate (short) link to the Storymap Item Details page.
Privacy considerations
Schools should consider issues around exposing Personally Identifiable Information (PII). See ArcGIS Online Organizations for Schools & Clubs for strategies for minimizing PII. Teachers and club leaders should help students minimize exposure of their own PII and that of others, including in map, image, and text.
Student Eligibility
- Entrants must be pre-collegiate students, registered in grades 5-12 at the time of project submission, from public schools or non-public schools including home schools, who have not yet received a high school diploma or equivalent.
- Entrants must reside in the state of Delaware or be attending a Delaware based school.
- Students can work alone or in a team of two but can participate in only one submitted entry. Teams with one student in middle school (grades 5-8) and one in high school (grades 9-12) must be considered as a high school team. Student teams of two from different schools will be counted according to the school of the first student listed.
- Entrants may work on the challenge through a school, a club, an “educational pod”, or independently, but entries must be submitted to the state from their primary school of record (a recognized school or home school).
Eligibility
- Entrants must be pre-collegiate students, registered in grades 4-12 at the time of project submission, from public schools or non-public schools including home schools, who have not yet received a high school diploma or equivalent.
- Entrants must reside in the state of Delaware or be attending a Delaware based school.
- Students can work alone or in a team of two, but can participate in only one submitted entry. Teams with one student in middle school (grades 4-8) and one in high school (grades 9-12) must be considered as a high school team. Student teams of two from different schools will be counted according to the school of the first student listed.
- Entrants may work on the challenge through a school, a club, an “educational pod”, or independently, but entries must be submitted to the state from their primary school of record (a recognized school or home school).
- Any school or home school program can submit to the state a maximum of five (5) entries total.
Prizes
The top 5 entries in each level (Middle School and High School) will be recognized at the competition award ceremony, with special awards given to the top 3 entries in each category.
Judging Criteria
Submissions will be judged on the clarity in which the chosen topic is presented, the use of good and appropriate data, effective analysis, good cartography, effective storytelling, and complete documentation.
The judging rubric is below:
- The topic is clearly identified and addresses a sustainability challenge in the student’s their school, community, state, or country. (10 pts)
- Overall presentation within the story map is effective in informing about the topic (10 pts)
- Cartography is effective — the composition, visualization, and interplay of layers (display scale, transparency, classification, symbolization, popups, charts, tables, labels, filtering, legend appearance) facilitates the viewer’s grasp of individual elements of the topic and story (20 pts)
- Data used is appropriate — engages an adequate volume and array of clearly significant elements, does not exclude clearly significant elements, does not include irrelevant elements (25 pts)
- Geographic analysis (classification, filtering, geoanalysis) is evident, appropriate, and effective; the “map product” is not “essentially uniform dots/lines/areas on a map”, nor “primarily pictures” (25 pts)
- Documentation in the item details page is clear and complete; all non-original contents (including images) in the presentation/ web app/ story map are appropriately referenced and/or linked to their sources are clear, and original contents are described and/or linked; documentation identifies processes used to analyze the content, plus any persons who assisted in project (including specifying if no one did) (10 pts)
Important Dates
- Registration begins: January 23, 2026
- Pre-Registration (recommended) Deadline: January 27, 2026
- Map Submission Deadline: May 1, 2026
- Award Notification: May 15, 2026
Tips
Choosing a Topic: Your project topic should be something that can be easier to understand or explain utilizing a map. When considering a topic, think about how a map could identify or clarify a geographic pattern.
Resources for Getting Started:
Project Presentation Tips
- Good projects gently help even a viewer unfamiliar with the region know quickly the location of the project focus. Requiring a viewer to zoom out several times to determine the region of focus detracts from the viewing experience. (Pretend the viewer is from a different part of the country, or a different country.)
- Maps should invite interactive exploration by the viewer, not be static (“images”). The presentation should hold the attention of the viewer from start to finish.
- Maps should demonstrate “the science of where” – the importance of location, patterns, and relationships between layers. There is an art to map design; too much data may feel cluttered, but showing viewers only one layer at a time may limit the viewers’ easy grasp of relationships.
- Care should be taken to make “popups” useful, limited to just the relevant information. They should add important information, and be formatted to make the most critical information easily consumable. These popups can include formatted text, key links, images, data presented in charts, and so forth.
- Document the project thoroughly. Previous awardees highlighted for documentation, and preceding national winners, show good documentation – organized and thorough.
For more information, contact:
Mary Schorse
Delaware Center for Geographic Education
Email Mary Schorse
Visit the GeoEducation hub site for more information and resources.