A giant, featureless shape.

That is what represented UW-Whitewater on Google maps before a team of four students transformed it.

Last spring alumni Chris Berryman, Jimmy Gardner, Amanda Kretschmer and Audrey Salerno placed third in a map-making contest sponsored by Google.

They competed against teams from 47 other universities to construct accurate maps of their campuses.

Thousands of edits later, the void was filled with roads, buildings and pathways. The students all graduated at the end of last semester, but with some help from the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Center their work has evolved.

Four months later there is now a fully-functional web application at gis.uww.edu/accessibility that is more detailed than the Google map.

Google does not have an icon for stairs on its maps. So the Center for Students with Disabilities reached out to the GIS Center to mark these barriers ahead of time.

Alvin Rentsch, a facilitator from the GIS Center, saw a group of people with a problem and a

chance to make their lives easier.

“A paper map doesn’t tell you where stairs are and, for students with disabilities, it can be a hindrance,” Rentsch said. “Google maps are great, but they are somewhat limited and out of the competition this new map was born.”

Rentsch said right now the map’s main function is to route people around campus. His hope is that soon anyone will be able to update the map in real time.

With additional funding, he said the map could even be expanded to include the community surrounding the university.

He pointed out that at the beginning of the semester all of the construction, particularly around

the water feature, closed down several sidewalks and pathways.

While some students simply walked around these barriers, others with disabilities had to find alternate routes.

“This is the product of the students’ work and they pushed themselves on this project,” Rentsch said. “It’s amazing to see what they did in 21 days too; it makes you wonder what they could have done in say 21 weeks.”

The project might have ended, but the students will continue to apply the skills they acquired in the real world.

The team’s leader, Berryman, will use his experience from this project to create similar maps for

entire cities. Another member, Gardner, got a job after graduation as a cartographer for Garmin in Kansas City.

Gardner said that during the interview process employers were impressed that a group from a “small school” was so successful. He credits the school’s outstanding geography department.

“The project was time consuming and some areas of the map were impossible to edit,” Gardner said. “The work we completed though demonstrates that it’s not the size of the university, but the amount of time and dedication put into a project.”

The Google team is gone, but the legacy of its work remains. The maps it created can be viewed by anyone in the world and since they are updateable can be repurposed to suit the campus’ needs.