Montana State Offering Geospatial Skills Camps in Rural Areas

Thanks to a grant from the US Air Force, Montana State University is offering another round of Geospatial Skills Camps, to be held in five rural Montana communities next June.

What exactly is a Geospatial Skills camp?

Honestly, it depends.  At its core, it's a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) camp intended for incoming freshman and sophomore high school students.  MSU's plan is for each of the chosen communities to decide what they want their camp to cover.

Looking over suggestions from MSU, it could range from natural resource management to meteorology to learning how to read satellite map data.  It could also extend to cover things like drones and aviation.

It's called Geospatial Skills Camp for reasons which will be explained further down.

Any guest speakers (who could be from MSU, a Montana-based business, the Air Force, or even NASA) would speak at all five camps, regardless of what the communities decide on for their chosen topics.

What else is known about this?

Next summer's camps are the second of a set of three made possible by a grant from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, awarded to MSU's Science Math Resource Center, which is an outreach center to encourage an interest in, big surprise, science and math, in Montana students.

As for why the camps are called 'Geospatial', it's because they are going to be hosted by MSU's Earth Sciences Department and each camp will include a trip to MSU's campus to tour the Geospatial Core Facility.

Applications to be one of the five communities to hold the camps will be accepted until December 19th, and it isn't limited to just schools.  Applications will be accepted from other educational organizations (they stress that they want the applications to come from organizations, not individuals), such as libraries, 4-H and Scouts, and can be found here.