• 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.

Winners of the Delaware competition are typically announced in May. One winner at the MS level and one winner at the HS level will be submitted to ESRI as Delaware’s entrants to the National Competition. National competition winners will be announced by Esri per the national competition schedule.

• The top 5 entries in each level (Middle School and High School) will be awarded $100 for the State level competition.
• Those top State entries (5 MS and 5 HS) will be submitted to ESRI with the Top entry from each level (MS & HS) being entered into the National Competition.
• Prizes for national winners will be posted here when announced.

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 presentation, and complete documentation.

The rubric used for state level judging criteria, based on the 100 pt national rubric, is as follows:

• The topic is clearly identified, meets [nation’s/state’s] criteria, focuses on content within state borders (5 pts)
• Overall presentation within the app or 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 (20 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” (20 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) (25 pts)

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. Hint: Check out previous years entries to get ideas of the topics and focus selected.

Getting Started:

• Sign Up to enter the contest here
• ArcGIS Online Account
• Creating an ArcGIS Online Map
• Create and Share Story Maps
• GeoInquiries
• StoryMaps Live free webinar series

Review previous year winners from other states. To see other state’s previous year winners visit the ESRI School Competition page

Project Presentation Tips

• Look at previous national winners and honorable mention projects. This is a “map competition”. Entries should address an identified issue/puzzle/challenge/discovery, not just documenting what’s where, but looking at “why it’s there,” and “so what.” Entries should be analytical in nature, map-centric rather than photo-centric or relying on too much text. Use of videos or static images generated by anyone other than the team members must be carefully documented, and such media should be used sparingly; outside content generally detracts in national judging. The project must emphasize student work; professionally generated GIS data generally does not detract from national scores this way. A good way to judge project balance quickly is to identify the amount of time a viewer would spend consuming the entire project; map-based time and attention should be at least two thirds.
• 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.

Associate Director
Mary Schorse
Delaware Center for Geographic Education
Email Mary Schorse