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Lecture: Monday 12:00 to 12:50pm
Lab: Thursdays 1:00 to 2:50pm
1 Credit Hour
Instructor: Prof. Michael Strager

The goal of this course is to demonstrate the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in the social sciences. Specifically, the course will teach students spatial and quantitative analysis methods applied to problems in business and marketing, community planning and development, health care, crime analysis, environmental justice, recreation, and other applications. This course is designed to build confidence and familiarity in students with the use of GIS technology with timely and appropriate local applications in some of the social science fields.

At the end of this course, student should be able to:

1. Understand how place and space are important and can be analyzed with GIS in various social science fields.
2. Know how to find and download appropriate census data for use with political boundaries.
3. Perform business and marketing space based analyses.
4. Analyze the patterns of features and use models to make predictions about future conditions.

To accomplish these objectives, the course will integrate lectures and a weekly structured lab session.  Lectures will cover the necessary background of issues and the labs will give students the opportunity to develop GIS skills to solve spatial problems.