GIScience Bowl

Background, Rules, Solicitation of Questions

Each summer at the annual assembly meeting of UCGIS, three-person graduate student teams compete to capture the title of GIScience Bowl National Champions. Teams form informally on the evening of the event.  Each team has representation typically from different universities and different academic areas. Each team is assigned a well-known leading academic in the discipline who serves as a "lifeline" for the team up to two times during the event.

The rules for the competition are stated at the beginning of the sample questions. With lots of hoopala and an "official panel of experts" in the audience for disputed calls, we run a qualifying and a final competition round. Each member of the winning three-person team is proclaimed as "Geographic Information Science Bowl - National Champion" for the year and receives suitable awards, accolades and cheers.

Previous Year Champions

Please Send Us Questions and Answers!

We need your help in constructing questions for the competition. For the purpose of the competition we are defining Geographic Information Science as incorporating knowledge from the following thirteen areas:

1. cartography,

2. cognitive science,

3. computer science,

4. engineering and land surveying,

5. environmental sciences,

6. geodetic science,

7. geography,

8. geographic information systems and spatial technologies

9. landscape architecture, planning, & transportation

10. law, information policy, and organizations

11. remote sensing and digital photogrammetry,

12. statistics, geostatistics and spatial analysis,

13. history of GIScience, UCGIS, & odds and ends

Questions must in a multiple choice format although the professorial explanation of how you justify your answer may be much longer. Consult the sample questions used in previous competitions.

For each suggested question, please supply:

(a) the question,

(b) the category of the question (i.e. number 1 through 13 in the above list)

(c) the answer,

(d) four distracters,

(e) your name as the authority for the answer and/or an authoritative reference for the answer.

Please send your questions as part of the text of an e-mail message (NOT an attachment) to onsrud@spatial.maine.edu at any time up to a week before the date of competition. We look forward to hearing from you soon!