GEOWAVE™ teaches the discipline to its full depth, the way a research lab does — then puts every student to work on a real client's problem with it. A stacked-credential pathway from classroom rigor to paid, portfolio-building practice.
Why we teach this way.
Three tiers, one spine.
Who this serves, and what they get.
Bound by mathematics and dimension. A watershed, a city, a climate, a supply chain: each is a structure of relationships across space and time. GEOWAVE™ teaches the science of measuring, modeling and reasoning about that structure, whole.
Read it and you understand the world. Build with it and you change it. GEOWAVE™ awakens spatial reasoning — the intelligence the machine age can't replace.
We are building the means to teach spatial reasoning to everyone who shapes the world — students, builders, and decision-makers — so a connected planet is understood and engineered with rigor, not guessed at. From a child's first map to a professional's hardest call, GEOWAVE makes the invisible structure of relationships visible, measurable, and yours to work with.
We hold to the Wisconsin Idea: that education must serve the local, the regional, the national, and the global good. GEOWAVE carries spatial knowledge beyond the classroom — into communities, industries, and the hands of the people who will steward a connected world. Learning that doesn't stay in the lecture hall, but reaches the places that need it.
A teacher's work is not to deliver points but to help a mind learn, and understanding happens by thinking together, not by being told.
Enthusiasm · Wanting to know → Imagination · Seeing what is not on the map yet → Knowledge · The discipline's hard-won rigor → Creativity · Knowledge put to work on the unsolved → Productivity · Understanding that does real work
The rigor GEOWAVE teaches was forged in a deep engineering tradition — geodesy, measurement, the foundations of spatial reality — and carried to our founder by his teacher, Professor Alan P. Vonderohe, at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Much of that program has since vanished from public view. GEOWAVE does not reproduce it; it carries it a generation forward, into the AI age.
A full learning-management system with geography in its core — lectures, labs, grading, a live map, and real computation in one place. Everything a course needs, and the one thing no other LMS has: the map is part of the lesson.
← On the left — live global imagery under the matrix-intelligence layer: the planet, read as a web of relationships.
Build a course, deliver lectures and readings, assign and collect labs, run the midterm and final, and grade it all in a live gradebook the student sees in real time. Rubrics, curves and progress, end to end.
← On the left — the gradebook and this week's readings, exactly as an instructor works them.
The one thing no other LMS can do: geography in the core. Bring in spatial datasets, render them as live layers, classify and style them, and let students explore and build on a real map canvas — every concept a living map, not a static slide.
Behind every lab runs a full server-side spatial stack. Students write and run real geospatial code in mapR, our spatial R editor, or in Python, all in the browser, on any device. No setup, no licenses, no install.
← On the left — write, hit Run, get real output. The wall between learning about and doing disappears.
# mapR — spatial R, in the browser library(sf) dem <- read_layer("inland_dem") slp <- terrain_slope(dem) slp <- classify(slp, breaks = "jenks") summary(slp)
Geosage is the teaching layer built into the platform — a guide, not an oracle. When a student is wrestling with a concept, it doesn't hand over the answer; it returns the question that opens their thinking, and lets them arrive there themselves. Where other AI answers for the student and quietly weakens them, Geosage makes them stronger for having used it.
← On the left — a real exchange, the way it actually runs.
Every program closes the gap between the classroom and industry: real problems, real clients, a portfolio, and paid practice.
Custom courses and a full Master's build on the same spine — see Custom. Any of them runs as professional training, or for university credit.
One spine. Stop at any level with a credential, or keep going.
| Courses | Credential | What they can then do | Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2 | Foundation Certificate | Reads spatial evidence critically | Two months |
| 7 | Certified Intelligence Associate | Produces spatial intelligence | Six months |
| 10 | Certified Intelligence Practitioner | Delivers solutions for real clients, with residency | A year |
For credit, the same ladder reads Minor at seven courses and PG Diploma at ten.
Departments that want their own shape build it from the thirty base courses, in their own field.
Choose the base courses that fit the department, around the same core: water, terrain, imaging, computation. Your faculty teach them once certified.
The ten spine courses, twelve base courses and a thesis, over two years, awarded by the university. Built for engineering and environmental departments.
Both run on the same platform, and carry the same credentials inside them.
Three ways to begin, and a teaching path that ends with the partner's own faculty in charge.
Two days on campus, and a first cohort chosen
Courses 1 to 7, taught live over six months
Courses inside the university's own degrees
Sections of forty or fewer · in person on agreed milestones, online in between
Every learner moves through the same five, with evidence to show at each.
Why thinking matters: peer-reviewed brain-imaging research found that a year of geospatial learning changed how students reason, and the gains carried into verbal reasoning. Science Advances, 2022
How we know where things are — measurement, geodesy, and the foundations of spatial reality.
Thirty base courses today, and more as the discipline grows.
Turning the world into digital form — vectors, images, databases, and their limits.
Thirty base courses today, and more as the discipline grows.
Acquiring the world — photogrammetry, remote sensing, satellites, and field measurement.
Thirty base courses today, and more as the discipline grows.
Operating on space — computation, interpolation, analysis, and optimization.
Thirty base courses today, and more as the discipline grows.
From analysis to insight — statistics, AI, communication, and engineered solutions.
Thirty base courses today, and more as the discipline grows.
Geowave™ runs inside the university, from a first cohort to a Master's, and becomes its own.
Enroll directly or through your university, work on real problems, and step into practice.
Teachers learn the program alongside their students, teach it with Mapsol, and then carry it.
Over time, graduates return as instructors.
Professional training for departments, built on their own problems and their own data.
Potholes aren't bad luck. They're predictable from where water pools.
Predict which road segments will fail, and fix them before they open.
Professional training for companies, and first access to practitioners who have already shipped real work.
A product's afterlife isn't trash. It's a mapped resource, routed back into value.
Waste, logistics and facility siting, joined up to route material back into use.
An AI‑powered Learning Management System — graphics, maps, coding, lectures & more, with spatial visualization & analysis built in.
Join Dr. Kiran Manchikanti for a live walkthrough of GEOWAVE — see it built, and see it teach.
Missed a live session? Browse our archive of previous webinars and walkthroughs of the GEOWAVE platform and tools.