Geo Leah

In this week's module, we practiced writing and editing a simple Python script in four steps. In Step 1 we wrote our full name as a string, then split each name into separate items in a list, then selected our last name using an index. In Step 2, we had to find and correct errors in code for a dice game in which each player rolls dice with a total value that is twice the number of letters in their name, and they win if their roll is greater than half the possible total.  In Step 3, we wrote a while loop with an if statement and break statement that created a list of 20 random numbers between 0 and 10. I was not sure what a counter variable was, so I had to look that up. I was able to write the code for Step 3 easily as just a while loop, but once I added an if statement and a break statement, I got stuck in an infinite loop and had to terminate ArcGIS Pro. I think it was because I originally included print statements in my while loop, although I don’t understand why that would crea...

This week was an introduction to Python for ArcGIS Pro. We explored different integrated development environments (IDEs), such as IDLE and ArcGIS Notebooks, and practiced using flowcharts to think through how to solve a problem or complete a task with code. A flow chart I made of how I would convert 3 radians to degrees I found this week’s assignments very simple. I had never thought of writing code to do something like create new files in a folder on a computer. This seems like such a short and easy task, but I see the benefits of running a script to do it (especially because file paths/folders can be one of the most convoluted parts of programming if not set up correctly!). I was surprised and delighted that you could run geoprocessing tools directly from Notebooks in ArcGIS Pro, and I’m very excited to learn how to automate other easy but surprisingly time-consuming tasks (and hopefully some hard tasks?) within ArcGIS Pro! As part of this week's assignment, we read "The Zen...

For this week's lab, we explored how to create maps in Google Earth. In the first part of the lab, we created a map of southern Florida in Google Earth with different types of surface water represented by different colors and a dot density layer in which each dot represented 10,000 people. I opened the surface water layer in ArcGIS Pro, adjusted the symbology, and converted it to KML. I then opened this KMZ file in Google Earth, along with the county boundary layer and the dot density layer. Using the Image Overlay tool in Google Earth, I added the image of the legend from the lab data folder. For the second part of the lab, I created a recorded tour of the major metropolitan areas of southern Florida in Google Earth. I created placemarks for cities and metropolitan areas and zoomed to those locations, turning off and on the dot density map as appropriate. For downtowns, I zoomed close enough to see the 3D building effects in Google Earth, which I thought was a fun tool. I saved th...