Lower Four's Geographical Research around the School

The Lower Four geographers have immensely enjoyed their first experience of geographical fieldwork and enquiry at Queen Anne’s! 

They have conducted a geographical enquiry into the microclimate of Queen Anne’s with the aim of discovering the best location for a new school bench.  This has involved the use of anemometers, thermometers, and lux metres, as well as an environmental quality survey to find the most tranquil place with the best views. All the information was collated using an app called Survey 123 which geo-locates the data enabling it to be simply ‘dragged and dropped’ into a GIS application which creates a located proportional symbols map in seconds. Without their laptops, the process of tabulating the data and creating a hand-drawn map would have taken many lessons.

The Lower Fours  had a lot of fun, discovered previously unvisited parts of the school grounds, and along the way have learned about accuracy and reliability of data, about different sampling techniques, and also about using GIS software to analyse their results spatially on a map.

This is the first step on a QA geographer’s seven year learning journey which culminates at A Level in the completion of a 4000 word independent geographical investigation into any aspect of geography – examples from our current geographers include air pollution in Henley, liveability in different Reading suburbs, and changing sediment patterns along Hurst Spit.