A Trimble SSi GPS Total Station System is being used to link Agricultural courses, Agricultural Surveying, Machinery and Equipment, Fertilizer and Soil Productivity, and Range Science. This curricular link is more than sharing equipment; it requires the transfer of knowledge and the interaction of students, faculty, and resources among courses with planned outcomes. The GPS total station uses signals from a constellation of 24 NAVSTAR satellites to provide three-dimensional point positions on the earth with accuracies of 1 centimeter, real time kinematic. This GPS instrumentation affects all students in the department and also influences students in the departments of Technology, Geography and Planning, and Biology. Course linking is accomplished through teaching Precision Farming, which is dependent on GPS for georeferencing of soil sampling, a soils and fertilizer application, variable-rate applications, and real-time yield monitoring, an agricultural machinery and equipment application. Range courses also have GPS applications. Data collected using GPS are stored and referenced using Spatial Mapping, a Geographical Information Systems (GIS) technology. For example, the Agricultural Surveying class stakes out the fields to be used in Precision Farming, and those coordinates are saved to a database to be used in the other courses. In agricultural surveying, GPS is being used in topography, control, cross sections, and boundaries. The scientific equipment used in this project reinforces basic mathematical and scientific principles. Use of geodetic GPS receivers strengthens the current use of algebraic, trigonometric, and geometric mathematics and adds the use of statistical theorems. For example, error checking methods and theories dealing with probabilities, least-square adjustments including stochastic and mathematical models, along with propagation of mean and variance-covariance are being applied to data collected in the Surveying Laboratory Exercises.
