📋 🗺️ 📍 📸

A stitched photo strip taped onto card, with hand-drawn labels and arrows pointing at things, photographed flat on the ground.

🎒 What you need

the shared phone, a long stick or safe high spot
card or flattened box, tape, and a pen
your Pilot's Pledge from module 5

✋ Do this

Pick your place: your compound, the school yard, a garden plot, the space around a borehole or water tap.
Plan first. Draw on paper the straight lines you will walk and where each photo goes, with a third overlap. A plan makes a map; wandering makes a mess.
Take your photos, high and pointing straight down, walking your planned lines. Do not change height halfway.
Lay them out overlapping on the card and tape them into one picture. Add a title, a north arrow and a scale note like 'this path is about 20 of my steps long'.
Now find something interesting IN the map that you cannot see from the ground: where water collects, where a path is worn, where there is empty space that could be planted. Label it with an arrow.
Copy your Pilot's Pledge onto the back. Then photograph the finished map with your hand in the picture, and show it to someone who uses that place every day.

💡 Why it works

You have done the actual work of aerial mapping: plan the lines, keep a steady height, hold your overlap, stitch, label and — most importantly — find the one thing in the picture worth telling someone. Real drone surveys live or die on that last step. The flying is the easy part; noticing is the skill.

🔥 Challenge

Map the same place at two different times — morning and evening, or dry day and after rain. Put the two maps side by side and mark every difference you can find.

📖 New words

surveycarefully looking at and recording a place

scalehow big something on the map is compared to real life

🎖️

Aerial Surveyor

Tap when you have finished this module.