Challenge based learning geoscience: student-oriented teaching for digital mapping

This essay presents Challenge-Based Learning with a student-oriented perspective in Geoscience showing how digital mapping constitutes a useful tool for teaching geomatic, geographical, urban and tourism disciplines. Focused on real-life case studies, it stimulates students to acquire integrated hard and soft skills in an active and collaborative way, to let them be protagonists of their educational path. The learning strategy adopted within some master’s courses at the University of Bergamo (Italy) is presented with the aim of offering an overview of its usefulness in the context of Geospatial Information Science for spatial planning, in respect of the environment and its ecosystems, of the bio-diversity of the territories and, also, of the vocations of a place and the communities living it. All these aspects are addressed through the use of cartography, intended not only as an Euclidean system of representation, but also as an interactive archive of spatial, geographical, environmental, socio-economic and human information in continuous transformation and evolution. In the master’s courses in “Geo-urban Planning” and “Planning and Management of Tourism Systems”, the Challenge-based learning and the student-oriented approach are experimented through the use of real-life case studies and collaborative processes and mapping to transfer Geosciences competencies and allow students to adopt measures for urban regeneration, landscape enhancement and slow tourism promotion.