GI school projects and their value and transferability to Uzbekistan

Geospatial technologies and spatial data have increasingly become a key issue in our world with regard to digitalization. The ability and capability to handle spatial data products is a key competence in the 21st century. Accordingly, school education is an important domain to address these skills, but still lacks behind its actual potential - even if numerous concepts and approaches already exist. A promising means of addressing this issue is to actively involve schools in real-world GI projects. This paper sums up relevant educational approaches and concepts that are important for such initiatives and briefly describes four selected projects that were carried out in Austria. Based on the knowledge gained in these projects, challenges and benefits are presented, and the transferability and the potential of carrying out such projects in Uzbekistan is discussed.