New project in Acre maps city on Google Maps to help tourists – ac24horas.com

A pioneering experiment has involved students, residents and tourists in the city of Mâncio Lima, located in the Juruá Valley, in the interior of Acre. The intense movement of tourists and the lack of information about places in the city led a group of students, led by professor and biologist Jeferson Dutra, to map important points in the city on Google Maps.

The idea arose as part of an extension project and now tends to be maintained. In addition to mapping, students created pages promoting tourist attractions, tutorials and online study pages. The students who took part in the project are from the first year of high school at the Antônio Oliveira Dantas school, in Mâncio Lima.

The first part of the project has already been completed and executed. “We were able to not only map, but also select some tourism spots to promote in Mâncio Lima. The idea came up, mainly, because, as I’m from Rodrigues Alves, when I came here, I needed to have lunch or look for an inn or snack bar, and there simply wasn’t this information attached to Google, from any neighborhood”, reports the professor who created the project.

It was then that Dutra passed the idea on to the students. The professor has been linked to the official Google since he was 14 years old, when he began working as a collaborator on the platform.

“Through training, I was the first Acreian to be invited by Google to visit the headquarters. I went last year, to London, and in 2024 I will go again, in September, to visit Google’s headquarters in São Paulo”.

According to him, the aim of this work (extension project) is to provide a practical return using the school, an education tool, for the benefit of society. “And it has helped a lot. We have already seen that it has more than 2.5 thousand views in a single point. It is not a project that advertises specific points, but rather in general, to facilitate access to information”, he explains.

With the resources they had and the support of the school management, they managed to carry out the experiment and have a very successful return, as well as a satisfactory result. “In practice, it helps us by providing relevant information to tourists. So we intend to continue with this project and even work on a new one, which has not yet been executed, but planning will continue from now on. This is a project for third-year students, quite ambitious, but extremely viable”, highlights the professor.

With this, they seek to mobilize several teachers. “There is a new subject in the new high school called post-secondary. We teach these students what their life is like outside of high school, their life at college. We teach you how to file an income tax return, a Course Completion Project. And this project has two objectives: it is a research project and also an extension project”.

Jeferson Dutra highlights that students do some research in Mâncio Lima’s society to understand some important points. “There are questions like, for example, if you were bitten by a snake, what would you do? Some don’t drink water, but you should drink water. We investigate this important information, as it helps us carry out environmental education activities and save lives. Not only that, but we are focused on each professor having an area of ​​research to investigate.”

Jeferson Dutra in a meeting with global Google collaborators – Photo: Archive/Courted

Confirm the teacher, these investigations generate a practical product, which is information about the city, made by students. “We teachers don’t want credit for anything, we want to leave students as the protagonists of everything. We are passionate about teaching and by showing this passion we have for our work, we aim to inspire other schools in the Juruá Valley, a wonderful region to explore. There are many questions yet to be explained to students and also encourage this curiosity”.

Google Contributor

Jeferson’s collaboration with Google began with a project that the platform had had for a long time, back in the days of Orkut. “Employees have always contributed their knowledge voluntarily. Orkut ended, but the help forums for Google products continued and were expanded. I delved deeper into this and still do today. Whenever there is a new product, before launch, we test these products to see if there are any problems. For example, if Gmail is having a problem, we are the ones who report it and send feedback to the company.”

Caption: Jeferson Dutra has been a teacher and collaborator at Google since he was 14 (PHOTO: Archive/Courted)

In 2014, he began to be invited to visit Google’s headquarters and refused due to fear of flying. “Last year (2023) I decided to face fear and I loved it. And now every year I will no longer miss any of our global meetings, which is where all Google contributors in the world are,” he celebrates.

The group uses the link https://maps.google.com/localguides/. It is with it that the group maps the city and Google Maps itself attaches the information to its database.