Dallas College GIS Project Blossoms in Extraordinary Ways

by

J. Scott Sires, Dallas College geospatial technology professor, unpacks a drone purchased with an ATE grant he led.

A geographic information systems (GIS) project has gained extraordinary momentum in the two years since its Advanced Technological Education grant funding ended.  

The project led by J. Scott Sires, a geospatial technology professor at Dallas College’s Brookhaven Campus, has had these recent achievements:    

  • A service learning experience that involved students in mapping part of Brookhaven Campus led to Dallas College hiring students as interns to create three-dimensional floor plans of facilities on   seven campuses and at 15 centers.
  • During the first 16 months of this floor-plan mapping project, 10 interns completed scans of 80% of the college’s 5.5 million square feet of property. College administrators are pleased with the high quality, multi-use data that the interns have gathered more quickly than anticipated.  
  • In July the college hired one of the interns as a facility space analyst. Sorting the field data to make it useful to facility managers and first responders is one of the tasks of this newly created role. The college’s chief facilities officer reports he would like to hire more GIS program alumni in the future.  
  • The sequence of stackable GIS credentials—including an 18-hour dual-credit, high school program—that Sires developed from his ATE grant work was approved recently by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board for statewide use.
  • Other Texas higher education institutions are evaluating the intern training materials and the GIS curriculum for potential adoption and adaptation.
  • Sires received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the GeoTech Center this summer.

Sires said the Mentor-Connect mentoring he received in 2017 to prepare the ATE grant proposal, which won a $224,000 grant by the National Science Foundation in 2018, has “led to some opportunities that now are blooming ... And so that’s exciting.”

» Read More or Comment

 

ATE Impacts is also a book! Copies are available upon request or at the annual ATE PI Conference in Washington, DC.

ATE Impacts also has a video series, that tells the stories of students, educators, administrators, and industry partners who have had their lives positively impacted by the work of the ATE program.
Email ATE Impacts
Have an ATE story to tell?
Email us at [email protected]
Creative Commons License The ATE Impacts blog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. You are free to share, copy, distribute, transmit, and adapt this work, provided you attribute it to the Internet Scout Research Group. If you alter this work, you may distribute your altered version only under a similar license.