At Geography Mapathons, Students Make Their Mark on the World

Geography students have helped combat malaria in Mozambique, mudslides in Sierra Leone and an Ebola outbreak in Guinea. They’ve guided ambulances through earthquake-ravaged streets in Nepal and Puerto Rico and led rescuers to flood-stranded families in Ghana. And they do it all from their laptops, during Mapathon events. During one week-long Mapathon, which traced secure food routes through the Philippines, students mapped close to 14,000 pieces of infrastructure in under four hours — the equivalent of roughly a year’s work for an individual cartographer.