UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis

CAPABLE stands for Children's Activities, Perceptions And Behaviour in the Local Environment. It is a project financed by EPSRC involving four groups in UCL, namely the Centre for Transport Studies from which the project is run by Professor Roger Mackett, CASA, Bartlett Planning, and Psychology.

The project is focused on measuring and monitoring journeys made by young children (aged 8 to 10) from home to school as well as all other related trips these children make on school days as well as at weekends. What we have done is measure the actual routes used by children over a 4 day period using GPS and energy monitors attached to the kids, i.e. on their person, from which we get detailed tracking and energy use that we can visualize in terms of 2D map environments. We have also supplemented this material with mental maps drawn by the kids and travel diaries. Various supplemental studies on the social networks which the children belong to as well as the design of more walkable environments are being developed in the project.

The project involved considerable pre-planning. The research assistants first conducted the surveys through briefing children, parents and teachers in the primary schools north of London (South Hertfordshire) where the surveys took place. Much effort was spent in assembling and testing the GPS and energy monitoring equipment, and making sure that children, teachers and parents were fully cogniscent of the need to keep the equipment powered up at home as well as at school. Several PhDs are being written on work which has emanated from the project and various publications are available from the web site (below).

One rather innovative part of the work involving CASA is the visualisation of the tracks of the children on the web using our Google Map software - G-Map Creator and you can see these on our news page. The web site about the project is accessible from the following link.

http://www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/capableproject/