For Tim Joyce, President of Sound Venture Productions, the connection is personal. “My great uncle fought at Vimy, and he was killed the night before the battle on a night raid,” he said in a 2019 interview. “A hundred years later, to the day, I stood at his grave. That was a very moving experience for me.”

Tim had been brought to a now-serene countryside by the Royal Canadian Air Force as part of the centennial celebrations of the Battle of Vimy Ridge in 2017. His role was to promote a series of documentaries, plane replicas and maps developed by Sound Venture, in partnership with the Royal Canadian Geographical Society (RCGS), but his great uncle was not far from his mind.

On a dangerous raid, Lieutenant Alfred Philip Gibaut would have used one of the most important weapons in the Allied soldiers’ arsenal: detailed maps of the enemy’s trenches, fortifications, and artillery, only recently made available through aerial reconnaissance.

The role of aerial mapping evolved quickly from 1914 to 1918. Allied high command originally dismissed it as unimportant, but soon realized that knowing the exact location of a machine gun nest or artillery piece was key to avoiding or destroying it. Canadians took a leading role in this transformation of war, with thousands of Canadian pilots and topographic surveyors contributing to mapping the front lines. The skills they developed opened the way for mapping Canada’s largely uncharted wilderness in the decades after the war.

Giant maps: from the sky, to the trenches, to the classroom floor

To help students learn about this part of Canada’s military history, Sound Venture and the RCGS developed giant floor maps for classroom use. One map, Drawn to Victory, depicts the Western Front of the war; the other shows Vimy Ridge. Both were available in classroom (5m x 4m) and giant (11m x 8m) formats and were replicas of the kind of map that a soldier might have carried in his pocket in the trenches. Each map came with a teacher’s guide, photo and fact cards, and 10 learning activities designed to help young people learn about the war.

Through Canadian Geographic, the floor maps travelled to schools across Canada. “Each map goes to 20 schools per year,” Ellen Curtis of Canadian Geographic said, “and about 50 to 100 students use it for each visit. Some schools invite other schools in to see the map when they have it.” She noted that having a map to walk around and interact with was far more engaging than memorizing names and dates from a book. There was also a personal connection, as many students realized that the map was a replica of something that might have been carried by a peer of the same age group in a trench far from a high school gymnasium. 

The Commemorative Partnership Program

From 2016 to 2018 and from 2019 to 2020, the floor maps project received support from Veterans Affairs Canada (VAC)’s Commemorative Partnership Program. This funding supported the development and initial distribution of the maps, helping make them available to educators across the country.

“VAC played a large role in sustaining momentum,” Tim said. “Without this support, those maps would be sitting in a warehouse, doing nothing. We needed Commemorative Partnership Program funding to get them across to the teacher network.”

The floor maps remain one of the project’s lasting contributions. Tim said that Sound Venture was not finished working on commemoration. “There’s a great appetite for more education about Canada’s history, particularly its war history. We never want to stop promoting opportunities to learn.”

To learn more about the floor maps, visit the Canadian Geographic Education website.