In July 2017, at Esri's International User Conference in San Diego, MNIT staff in partnership with the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) were recognized for their efforts with a highly competitive Special Achievement in GIS (SAG) award.

The SAG award recognized MNIT and MDE's work over the past three years to develop GIS workshops for K12 teachers throughout the state of Minnesota. The SAG Award also recognized MNIT and MDE's work in launching a statewide middle and high school GIS mapping competition, which has gone on to serve as a prototype for a national GIS mapping competition.

There to accept the award from Esri's founder Jack Dangermond was MNIT's Scott Freburg, K12 GIS Project Lead housed at MDE. This project is ongoing and has several collaborative partners, including folks from the Minnesota Geospatial Information Office, Minnesota Alliance for Geographic Education, and the Minnesota GIS/LIS Consortium.

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is prevalent throughout local, state and federal government, as well as all 500 fortune 500 companies. Unfortunately, our K12 education system isn’t producing many students with GIS skills, including spatial and critical thinking and problem solving.

To address this, the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) signed a license agreement with Esri of Redlands, CA to provide FREE GIS software to all K12 schools, districts and clubs in 2013. This project started in 2014 to develop and bring GIS training opportunities to teachers.

Initially MDE developed a partnership with the Minnesota Alliance of Geographic Education (MAGE) at Macalester College, as well as the Minnesota GIS/LIS Consortium and Minnesota Geospatial Information Office (MnGeo) to develop hands-on training workshops. By partnering with local, regional and state GIS professionals around Minnesota, it allowed training sites to be developed and put on all around the state.

Between 2014 and 2017, over 60 workshops were held and more than 500 teachers attended. Many of these teachers attended more than one workshop. From this, GIS usage accounts jumped from less than 10 to over 230.

Because this project was so successful, three other states began similar projects and Esri started a National Competition in 2017. More than 25 states competed and the overall high school winner was from Minnesota’s own Duluth Denfeld High School.

The project started a collaboration with GIS/LIS Consortium to hold a one day (all-day) hands on training the first day of their statewide conference in October 2017. This is an ongoing project and has many collaborators. It has been a large task but Minnesota will reap the benefits for years to come as students enter college with increased spatial and critical thinking skills.