Many of you have heard me make this statement over the last year in the context of explaining why ArcGIS Online is great. But the question remains, is it really easy enough for kids? I recently had a chance to find out.

My 9-year-old son Joshua is in cub scouts and every year they sell popcorn as a fundraiser to pay for their activities throughout the year. We attended the popcorn selling kickoff this year and the leader of our group was explaining that he often prints a map of the neighborhoods where his boys are selling so they can check off houses they sold to, those that weren’t home, etc. He then also talked about transposing the paper order sheet into an Excel spreadsheet.

Like any good GIS geek, when I hear the words map and spreadsheet together some bells go off. Throw in the concept of collecting data in a mobile environment and this quickly became a great opportunity to teach Joshua about what I do everyday.

So Josh and I headed home with the intention of creating an ArcGIS Online WebMap for collecting his popcorn orders. We started by creating template comma separated value (CSV) files for the three categories of events he wanted to enter:

Successful Sale No One Home, Potential Revisit Not Interested

For the Successful Sale CSV, we created fields for name, address, order date, each type of popcorn product, payment type, and a delivery flag. The goal was for Joshua to be able to capture everything he needed for each sale and then to be able to use the data when the delivery time rolls around.

We uploaded each of the CSV files to ArcGIS.com and the created a quick WebMap. We customized the field aliases to include product pricing, set up some cool symbols, and then published the map. The entire process took about an hour.



The next day, armed with my iPhone, Joshua hit the streets to begin selling. I had him use the ArcGIS Collector App instead of the basic Esri app because it is geared nicely toward collecting data in the field. Case in point, Joshua picked up the usage of the Collector App faster than most adults would and we didn’t have any of the change management issues we sometimes encounter with an aging workforce!

The GPS functionality worked great and allowed him to locate himself on the map. As he reached each house, he could drop a pin on the map and Collector provided a reverse geo-coded address:



The address can be copied into a new record, which is much easier than typing it in. The geo-coding worked pretty well but did occasionally pull up a neighbor’s address. So we validated them as we went along. Entering a new sale was very easy. Josh entered the name, date, address, the product quantities and then the payment details.



As each entry was made the WebMap was populated with quality data which represents each sale, not home, or not interested location as a point feature:



The app has been a success and I can truthfully state that this technology is no problem for a 9-year-old. And based on watching game usage, I’d bet kids much younger could be GIS-whizzes too. The best part of this quick project was that I got to sit in my comfy air conditioned car and watch Joshua’s progress in real time via my iPad as he entered the data.

The point data automatically appeared and I was able to do a quick QAQC of the entries as needed. I even lost Joshua at one point but was able to quickly find him by driving a block over to his last entered point. This makes a pretty strong case for managing data entry from the back office, another mobile location, or really anywhere at all.

Finally, to have just a bit more fun, I decided to mash up our targeted sales area with some online ArcGIS Online data. I pulled up median income and overlaid it with our initial sales location and found that we were in a pretty good location. I’m sure there’s some psychology as to the best median income for successful popcorn sales but that’s a bit beyond me. We will certainly use this layer to target Josh’s next sales day!



And the end of the day this was a great opportunity to teach Joshua a bit about GIS. ArcGIS Online was a natural fit and we had a lot of fun creating and using the app. We’ll wrap up the effort in November when we go to make the deliveries to each house.

We’ll create a new WebMap for that where we can symbolize based on the delivery flag for each sale record. And I now feel completely confident in stating that ArcGIS Online is easy enough for kids to use!