Exploring the World with MapQuest
Do your travel virtually? One of the objectives of the Gifts for Seniors/Tech for Seniors training curriculum is to help our Cohort Groups find interesting ways to employ our tablet technologies to find a “spark”. We look for fun ideas that are interesting and can be used to entertain, learn and enhance your ability to remain engaged with others and constantly expand your abilities.
We hope that using MapQuest to bring the world to you will be an easy, fun way to begin to explore. Although MapQuest has some functional limitations that we are evaluating, it is relatively easy to use and can help you start exploring. As you continue learning more about your tablets we will be introducing additional tools that will add to your ability to explore the world.
During class, we talked about exploring the town you were born in. We are now in a position to use MapQuest to learn more about the world. So let’s begin our journey. As we discuss some of the ways that MapQuest can be used to explore the world, we will include some information on what MapQuest can do well and where it has limitations.
Exploring Washington, DC
A lot of activity in the news today revolves around Washington, DC. There are a lot of Government buildings, Monuments, and Museums in Washington. We begin our journey by entering the location we want to find. This can be done by selecting “Find Places” on the menu and either typing “Washington DC” in the search field or by pressing the microphone icon on the “keyboard” and saying “Washington DC”. Once you see what you have said in the search file you can select the search result on the list presented. If you are just starting out, we suggest trying both ways – if you encounter a problem, ask for help. Your search might return multiple options on the specific location, we suggest selecting the most famous: “The White House”.
Your screen should look similar to the screen shown on the left of the picture above. If you see a street layout instead of the satellite view, use the layers icon and satellite icon to change your perspective. One of the limitations of MapQuest is that you will see the world from an overhead view. We can zoom in and out or move up, down, left or right but the view is only from above.
Use your fingers to zoom out on the view until it matches the middle screen. If you get disorientated zooming in and out, zoom out until you see the black dot which identifies the location you searched for. Center that dot on the screen and try zooming out slower and repositioning the image on the screen to help keep you oriented.
Now you can see the reflection pool, the Washington and Lincoln Monuments and the Tidal Basin. Scroll to the left until the White House (it will be the black dot) and the Washington Monument are on the far left of your screen. You can also see a green area stretching from the Washington Monument to the right which ends at the Capitol Building. You can continue exploring Washington, we recommend trying to use the microphone to do your searches in order to get used to using it. When you use the microphone to enter your search location you will see a “graph” of your voice and some activity during the search, this is normal and can sometimes take a little while. If it seems to be taking too long touch the location entry near the top of the screen and the search will eventually end. Occasionally you might need to be more specific like “the Reflection Pool in Washington DC”, or “The Vietnam Memorial in Washington DC”.
This is a great way to avoid typing and learn how to use you voice to do searches. It may be a hunt and peck exercise at first but stick with it for a while. If you continue to have problems let us know and we can help you.
Exploring News and Book Locations
We often hear news or read books about locations in the world where things happen. It can be useful to understand where these events are happening. Do you know where “Syria”, “Sri Lanka” or “Uzbekistan” is? One of the nice things about using your voice to enter the location is you don’t need to know how to spell it to search for it. How many of those countries did you know how to spell?
Some examples are the fires and mudslides that occurred in California recently. On the screen shown in the picture above, searching for “Malibu California” shows where this happened and it’s relationship to Los Angeles. The middle picture shows “Niagara Falls” and we can see the falls that were described in a recent book I read about people going over the falls in a barrel. Finally, there has been a lot of talk about scams and fraud and how large organizations in foreign countries are behind it. The screen on the right shows “Myanmar” – one of those countries involved in housing scam factories.
Where the heck is that school?
Do you follow sports? Ever heard a score of a game and wondered where is that school? MapQuest can help you find out where it is.
You can select “Find Places” and ask for “Vanderbilt University” – the screen on the left of the picture shows where it is located, Nashville, TN. Obviously Texas A&M is in Texas but which city? Your search results in multiple locations but I recall a conversation about a rivalry between the University of Texas in Austin and College Station so that’s where Texas A&M is. How about “Stanford”, “Brigham Young”, “Seton Hall” or “Pepperdine”? MapQuest can help you find out quickly.
Exploring New York
This topic touches on some of the limitations that MapQuest has and a suggestion on how to overcome them. This topic is a little more involved than the other’s in this section. So read the first paragraph, then you can skip to the next section if it gets confusing. We are happy to help if you would like to understand it.
You can explore New York similar to how we explored Washington, DC. Many of the interesting locations are unique to New York, for example, “The World Trade Center”, “The Empire State Building” and “The Chrysler Building” are examples of this.
Other locations may take some work. For example try searching for “The Statue of Liberty”, unfortunately the results show where to catch the ferries to get to the Stature, not where the Stature is. You can either use Wikipedia or Alexa to find out where the Statue is located. I used Alexa “What island is the Statue of Liberty on”; the result was “Liberty Island”, so I used that as the MapQuest search argument (Middle Screen above). If you reposition the screen to keep the red circle in the middle and then zoom in, you can see the Stature of Liberty from above – not very interesting from a satellite view. But if you look closely you can see her extended arm holding the torch pointing to the top of the circle.
This is one of the limitations of only seeing the world from a satellite perspective – you often can’t see the interesting details of the location. We will discuss other ways to see these details as we explore the internet further in a later lesson.
Strengths and Weaknesses
As mentioned above MapQuest is free and pretty easy to use, especially if you get comfortable using the microphone to tell it where you want to explore. Coupled with the ability to zoom in/out and move the focus with your fingers, you can start to have some fun exploring using a digital map.
Unfortunately, there are some limitations to MapQuest. The satellite view only displays the tops of attractions, so looking at “The White House”, “The Statue of Liberty” or “Mount Rushmore” will show you where they are located and you can certainly zoom in, but looking down from a satellite is probably a bit underwhelming.
When searching outside the US, you may need to also specify the country and/or city the attraction is located in, for example “Notre Dame Paris France”. You may also occasionally find that some non-US locations are not found, such as “the Great Wall of China” because it is not a unique location – it’s very long. “The Sphinx in Egypt” is another location not found. You can try using additional search arguments or a technique similar to what was discussed in “Exploring New York” to find what you are looking for.
Some mapping programs will also provide the ability to see a 360 degree view from in front of the location, allowing you to see what the attraction looks like from the ground view. These functions can be very powerful but typically increase the complexity of using the mapping tool.
Hopefully you have been able to follow along and you now feel a little more comfortable using MapQuest to begin to explore the world. “Practice makes Perfect” – try exploring on your own.
Use back arrow on your tablet (the left pointing arrow, 2nd from the left on the bottom of the screen) to return to the previous page.
