BARBARA PETCHENIK CHILDREN'S WORLD MAP COMPETITION 2007

The Barbara Petchenik Award was created by the International Cartographic Association in 1993 as a memorial for Barbara Petchenik, a past Vice president of the ICA and cartographer who worked through her life with maps related to children. The aim of the contest is to promote the creative representation of the world in graphic form by children.
The awards are given every two years during an ICA conference or an ICA general assembly, preferably at least one for each continent, with special consideration to the age of the child producing the drawing. The awarded drawings are submitted to UNICEF for consideration as greeting cards. Participating nations are encouraged to report on the ways they have used for collecting drawing (video report, etc.) and to collect and archive maps for further research.

Objective of the competition

The aims of the competition are to promote children's creative representation of the world, to enhance their cartographic awareness and to make them more conscious of their environment.

Rules of the competition

In other words, judges will be looking for:
  1. a recognizable connection between the form, shape, and use of cartographic elements which creatively address the Competition's theme.
  2. a recognizable image of all or a large portion of the world in which the shapes and relative locations of land masses and oceans are as correct as can reasonably be expected for the child's age and within the context of the "system of projection" used.
  3. appropriate cartographic elements such as symbols, colors, names and labels, etc., which help address the Competition's theme.
    - clarity and legibility of the point, line and area symbols appropriate to the media of expression, whether on paper or other surfaces, whether drawn or made up of indigenous materials.
    - expressive rendering and appropriate use of the perceptual dimensions of color, i.e., changes in value for quantitative distinctions and changes in hue for qualitative distinctions.
    - overall aesthetic quality in such matters as balance and harmony among the image elements.
National coordinator's guidelines for handling the competition * The maps and accompanying letter should be sent so as to arrive by June 1, 2007 to:

ICA Secretariat
c/o Faculty of Geographic Sciences
Utrecht University
P.O. Box 80115
3508 TC Utrecht
The Netherlands

ICA Guidelines for coordinating the competition
  1. that the public vote will not be a criteria for or influence on the ICA judges because the voting public will likely have no knowledge or appreciation of the Competition rules and guidelines;
  2. that the voting slip design be adjudicated by the Cartography and Children Commission, on behalf of the ICA Executive, so that its intent is clear; and
  3. that the Local Organizing Committee be responsible for producing the Public Award certificate.
Web exhibition in the Rare Books Collection at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada.

View the competition entries at  http://collections.ic.gc.ca/children/
the 2005 prizes at http://children.library.carleton.ca/cgi-bin/childmap/wn_result.php?Winners=2005+Competition,
and the 2003 prizes at http://children.library.carleton.ca/cgi-bin/childmap/wn_result.php?Winners=2003+Competition