Interactive games and maps can be good tools for students to use in developing their knowledge of geography. The following ten websites are good places to find a variety of interactive geography games and interactive maps that will help students develop their knowledge of geography. The last item in the list is a resource for creating your own geography game.
National Geographic Kids has a wide variety of games, puzzles, and activities for students of elementary school age. National Geographic Kids has nine games specifically for developing geography skills.
Placefy is a fun and challenging geography game that uses pictures as questions. Placefy presents players with an image of a city square, buildings, and other famous landmarks. Players then have to choose the correct answer from four answer choices. Playing the game is simple, but the images as questions make it a challenging game.
GeoNet is a geography quiz game from Houghton Mifflin that offers students more than just the state or country identification questions typical of geography games. GeoNet has a category of games based on a world map and games based on a map of the United States. Within each category are six types of quiz game questions. Each quiz game has two levels.
Place Spotting is a website of geographic riddles. Place Spotting is based on the Google Earth platform. Place Spotting users can create their own geographic riddles or try to solve riddles created by others. The search feature on Place Spotting lets users search for riddles based on level of difficulty, language, region, or creation date.
Learning Together offers four activities for learning about the geography of the United States. Learning Together also offers a game about world geography and a game about European geography.
Owl and Mouse Educational Software offers sixteen, free, interactive maps for students. The maps cover every continent except Antarctica.
Lizard Point gives students 37 interactive maps to study. The maps cover basic world geography as well as specific geography questions for various regions and countries around the world.
Reach the World produces great online games for Geography students. The GeoGames from Reach the World feature an interactive map which students drag and drop onto different elements. The beginner level games asks has student place continents and the poles in the correct position. As the games levels progress students have to place countries and capitals in their proper positions. In the Build Planet Earth section students have to place continents, oceans, mountains, and rivers in their proper positions.
Traveler IQ Challenge has 14 interactive geography activities. The activities can be embedded in a blog or website. If it is an option for you, I recommend embedding the activities into your class blog or website to cut down on the number of advertisements that your students see.
UMapper offers a platform for creating your own geography game. UMapper GeoDart is a simple game in which players have to locate the places the you specify. The directions for creating your own GeoDart game are contained in the video below.
What games would you add to this list? Please leave a comment.
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Monday, February 22, 2010
Ten Interactive Geography Games and Maps
Posted by
Mr. Byrne
at
7:56 PM
Labels: Educational Games, Geography, geography games, Teaching With Technology, Technology Integration
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8 comments:
My students really enjoy Stateris which is a tetris like map game where students must correctly position states. There are also versions for other countries. http://www.mapmsg.com/games/statetris/usa/
I posted a similar list on my student site (http://g5dragons.edublogs.org/2010/02/11/knowing-our-world-following-on-from-todays-assembly/) and two of the massive ones that I thought should be on your list were
http://www.purposegames.com/games: some great maps of different parts of the world generated by other users – I really like this one because student can then generate their own local area map quizzes!
http://www.geosense.net/: This one is great too because you can play against other people from around the world or just play by yourself...
Thank you for sharing all your great finds once again!
Another good site is www.freerice.com. You can identify countries around the world as well as capitals. The great thing is that for every correct answer you give 10 grains of rice to the poor.
There's the 50 States game:
http://www.addictinggames.com/50states.html
How many countries can you name in 5 minutes?
http://www.jetpunk.com/quizzes/how-many-countries-can-you-name.php
Where on Google Earth?
http://www.whereongoogleearth.net/
The Campaign Game
http://www.miniclip.com/games/campaign-game/en/
Statetris
http://www.mapmsg.com/games/statetris/usa/
And the Redistricting Game is very cool, but the link didn't work. Maybe it is temporary
www.redistrictinggame.org
Sheppard Software has some great games for learning about the United States. There are tutorials about the states, the capitals, and land/water features. The games are leveled for beginner, intermediate, and expert. My elementary students really enjoy this site.
http://www.sheppardsoftware.com/web_games.htm
Thanks, Richard, for another great list of resources!
~Linda
I also like the map layering features on National Atlas' Map Maker site http://www.nationalatlas.gov/natlas/Natlasstart.asp
One I've played myself over the years is Geosense.
http://www.geosense.net/
Hi! Great list. I can also recommend my own freeware game Seterra Geography Tutor.
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