Pizza for Intro to GIS Tonight

I was asked to teach an Intro to GIS class tonight for a professor who is unable to make the class. I think this is great. Much better than ripping these students off, and cutting them out of a class when the class only meets once a week. It's also not too bad for me as I taught this course last spring and summer.

The class is going over chapters 4 and 5 in the Getting to Know ArcGIS book. It's tough to just jump in for one class, but I want today's lesson to work well nonetheless.

So here are my ideas: Chapter 4 is 'Exploring ArcCatalog' and chapter 5 is 'Symbolizing Features and Rasters'. Not very exciting stuff on the face of it, but it's my job to amend that, right? I think we will go through the geoprocessing version 'Where to Open a New Pizzeria in the D/FW Metroplex' workshop that I devised a couple of years ago. This is a nice exercise that contains all of the new material in these two chapters.

Here is an overview of the steps we will complete:

1. Download and extract the personal geodatabase (data must be extracted to C:\ drive)
   
2. Explore the feature classes in ArcCatalog
3. Add the feature classes to ArcMap, playing around with symbology
4. Run first geoprocessing model (created using the Model Builder)
1. This model first calculate euclidean distance and convert features to raster.
5. Explore raster grids, playing around with symbology
6. Run second geoprocessing model
1. This model presents the users with a simple interface to enter weights and reclassification schemes for each variable considered. The model then ranks the suitability of each raster cell.

We should complete this exercise within 2 hours, after which I will end class.