About 60 local high school students joined the department of geography at the University of Oklahoma Tuesday for a hands-on opportunity to learn more about geography and current geotechnology directly from professors and geography experts.

The students met at Sarkeys Energy Center on OU's campus for a variety of hands-on activities all celebrating Geography Awareness Week. The students were from AP human geography and AP environmental science classes at Norman, Moore and Southmoore high schools.

The students explored Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Remote Sensing to learn how outdoor enthusiasts, politicians and emergency responders use geotechnology to answer questions and help make people's interactions with each other and their environment safer and more rewarding.

The students also completed an activity using Global Positioning System technology, a tool becoming widely used in commercial products such as car navigation systems. In addition to learning how to use GPS technology to map their surroundings, the participants explored its many other uses in human geography and environmental science.

"Geotechnology has been identified as an emerging major growth industry by the U.S. Department of Labor," said Jason Julian, assistant professor in the department of geography. "This event will introduce teens to the technologies currently being used by geographers and other scientists, show them the impact of this rapidly growing field, and excite them about possibilities for the future."

Students also completed a tree ring activity, designed to help them detect climatological information by examining the width of growth layers of trees. Using that information, students learned how geographers reconstruct droughts, floods, ecological disturbances and even the collapse of civilizations. In the lab, the students examined cores from trees, counted and measured their rings, and used the information to describe the environmental conditions in which this tree lives.

At the end of the day, students competed in a Geography Bowl, testing their knowledge of human geography and environmental science.