Elizabeth Preister and Brynn Ulrich, tenth graders from Lincoln Pius X High School, placed first in the 2024 Nebraska Story Map Competition with their entry Native American Reservations of Nebraska, and classmates Henry Cunningham and Lucas Newton placed second with their entry on Ash Borer Invasion.
Winners were announced at the end of the school year.
At the middle school level, fourth grader Edward Gerraughty from Mary Our Queen School in Omaha placed first with his entry on Edward Creighton.
Other Mary Our Queen fourth graders placing were Maeve Wythers (Edward Zorinsky), Franco McGill (Tom Osborne), Lauren Eiting (Sarah Joslyn), and Lucy Hussey (Father Flanagan).
The Nebraska Story Map Competition encourages students to use ArcGIS Online, a geographic system software, to research and analyze some aspect of Nebraska.
Esri, a geographic information system company, provides cash awards for statewide competitions and conducts a national competition in the United States.
Dr. Lesli Rawlings, a professor of geography at Wayne State College, has coordinated the Nebraska Story Map competition since 2018.
She submitted the student entries to Esri’s ArcGIS online competition for U.S. high school and middle school students. Although the Nebraska students did not place in the national competition, their maps, along with other national contenders, can be found at https://esriurl.com/agoschoolcomp.
Nebraska student maps are on the Nebraska Educational GIS (geographic information systems) Initiative web site at https://needgis.maps.arcgis.com/home/index.html and on the story map competition website: https://arcg.is/1r4OLb.
