Teaching geographic information systems (GIS) requires linking concepts with technical skills, which can be challenging, especially in standard lecture and laboratory-format courses. This paper reports on an introductory undergraduate GIS course that incorporated a community-driven problem-based learning exercise as a major component of the…

How, where and why GIS is taught has been debated heavily in the geography literature. This article is a contribution to that debate, because it offers a new perspective from which to teach GIS: problem-based learning. In a problem-based learning classroom, theoretical foundations and the real world of problems are understood as constitutive of…