As part of an initiative of the Ministry of Education here in Sri Lanka, I was assigned with the task of creating a database of all the students in Sri Lanka. The final product was to be a Geographical Information System that can cater to the digitalization of Sri Lanka. The first obstacle that came up in the process was finding the geo-locations of all the schools that are in Sri Lanka.
Sri Lanka is a relatively small island with over 10,000 schools spread out over the country. Finding the locations of all the schools in Sri Lanka wouldn’t have been possible if not for Google Maps. I made use of Google Maps to obtain the latitudes and longitudes respective to each school that has not been already mapped in Google Maps as an initial step of forming the Geographical Information System.
There were several approaches that I took to accomplish this task. One was to call the schools which had contact information documented, and ask directions to their school or if they were capable, to share their location through a pin on Google Maps. There were several cases where I taught school administration staff on how to use Google Maps and they were quite excited once they understood the potential of Google Maps to make their day to day life easier. In some cases, the roads leading up to the school was not documented as well, since they were situated in rural areas with small unpaved roads leading to the schools. The rest of the time, whenever I went out of the city to work in other districts, I would personally talk with the local community (eg: contact nearby shops and the postman of the respective area) and find the schools that were in the district and obtained the co-ordinates via the Google Maps by myself.
It was quite a fun experience, adding the schools that were in these faraway districts which haven’t received any recognition. Most of the schools that weren’t mapped were added as locations, and this wouldn’t have been possible without Google Maps to aid in making all these locations visible for anyone around the globe to discover.
All in all, with the support of Google Maps, co-ordinates of over 10,000 schools were acquired within a year which made possible to distribute the work to gather information of all the schools in Sri Lanka. The schools that were newly pinpointed had found it much easier now to share their location for people who want to visit their schools in order to support them or to provide learning opportunities for the students. Volunteering organizations who are looking to uplift the education standard of rural areas of Sri Lanka found it convenient to have pinpointed locations to discover the schools that were in the area that needed help and the quickest path towards them.
As a final note, I would like to say that I’m quite grateful for the facilities that Google Maps has opened up in brightening the future of the young enthusiastic school children of Sri Lanka. This feat would not have been possible if it wasn’t for the technology that Google Maps had offered.
It paves the way for us to design and develop the comprehensive system that integrates geo-locations of schools and the school data, allowing the decision-makers to take evidence-based decisions.
Adding a school on the map may be a small step, but it opens up new opportunities for the people of our country to help one another.
List of the newly mapped schools in Sri Lanka : Connecting Speckles of Innocent Smiles