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Week 2: ModelBuilder

Presentation Slides

  • Tuesday — ModelBuilder, Part A — Why models, then ModelBuilder in ArcGIS Pro: toolboxes, a first model, environments, reading a canvas, the Cities Near Rivers example start to finish, and how Lab 1 is the same pattern.
  • Thursday — ModelBuilder, Part B — The cookie model, then making a working model reusable: Add To Display, gray elements, renaming, parameters so the model runs as a tool, metadata; then a Lab 1 clinic on the rubric, a complete submission, checking your answer, and peer review.

Press F for fullscreen and P for presenter view with speaker notes.

Data for the Part A exercise: week02-cities-rivers.zip (under 1 MB) — U.S. cities, major rivers and a country outline for the conterminous United States, from Natural Earth (1:10m, public domain), in WGS 1984. Project, buffer the rivers 10 miles, intersect, and count; the answer the slides quote is 256 of 678 cities.

In-Class Practice

  • Model a Cookie (graded, 5 points) — done in class Thursday; upload a screen capture of your result by 9:30 am, fifteen minutes after class.

Self-check quizzes — not graded; open them on a phone or laptop as often as you like:

  • Models and ModelBuilder — Five questions on what a model is, how to read the ModelBuilder canvas, and the projection and dissolve decisions inside the Cities Near Rivers model.
  • Canvas to Tool — Five questions on turning a canvas into a tool someone else can run: why every tool needs its output drawn, parameters, why two right models can disagree, and metadata.

Lab Assignment

Lab 1 — Walmart Site Selection

Due Saturday at 11:59 pm as one PDF report on Learning Suite — 50 points.

Reading Quiz

Read Chapter 13 of GIS Fundamentals, 7th edition (Bolstad).

Quiz 2 — Cartographic Models and Modeling on Learning Suite: open book, done independently. Due Saturday at 11:59 pm — 20 points.

Note

If you see a discrepancy between Learning Suite and this page, please let me know so I can rectify it.