GeoGames

Why GeoGames?

Students in the United States are woefully ignorant about the rest of the world, and students in inner-city schools, who may not have traveled outside their neighborhoods, often do not even have a real conception of what the “world” is. GeoGames is a web-based series of activities that has been developed to help teach fundamental geography concepts in an enjoyable way.

Geogames can be played individually on any computer with Internet access, or can be a class activity using a SmartBoard:

GeoGames is based on ongoing research into children's conceptions of the world, using freehand maps collected from students in classrooms in New York City , in suburban Connecticut, and in Washington, DC. These maps provide a fascinating window into the students' cognitive development and into their conceptions (and misconceptions) of the world. The research looked at changes in shape, content, and such fundamental geography concepts as nesting, orientation, and scale. The project is also developing ways for teachers to assess these maps and use them as diagnostic tools in their classrooms.

GEOGRAPHY CONCEPTS

The research on which this project is based looked at the following aspects of geography learning:

Entities
In order to build a traditional map, a child must have a basic knowledge of the framing constructs: the shape--a circle if the map is to be a flat representation of a globe or some version of a rectangle if it is to represent a wall map--and the basic contents: the continents, the oceans, and the equator.

Relationships
Knowing the framing entities is a necessary start, but knowing how they are related to each other is the key to making the map a map (and not a list). There are three types of relationships: (1) spatial relations (which continent is on the left of the Atlantic Ocean and which on the right, how far is Africa from South America, how large is Europe compared to Africa), (2) orientation (what is above and what is below), and (3) nesting (which countries are inside which continents, which cities are inside which countries). All three have cognitive components and we have found that the first two are highly correlated: if students understand one, they generally understand the other. The third, nesting, has a much larger cognitive component and seems to come later; it is also much more related to understanding scale.

Nesting and scale
Understanding nesting is interwoven with understanding scale. Nesting is often taught by starting with my room, followed by my house, my neighborhood, my state, my country. But in terms of map-making, there is a huge leap from personal space--the distances that can be internalized because they can be navigated or mapped by walking or driving them (i.e., wayfinding)—and world space, or the distances that are physically incomprehensible. This is the problem of scale. As noted above, while children who travel (and particularly children who have flown in airplanes) have a better sense of scale, and therefore of world space, for most children the “world” is not a felt space but simply a picture. It must be learned.

We hypothesize that one way to help children make the bridge between the personal space that they can internalize, or “feel,” and world space is to use visual telescoping: to reduce each level in a nested series to a point as the next level is introduced. So, for instance, as you move to larger and larger spaces, the previous spaces become smaller and smaller: a home becomes a dot on a street, a street becomes a dot in a city, etc. We believe that this telescoping, along with zooming (zooming in and zooming out), will help a child understand the relationship between nesting and scale.

Freehand maps as diagnostics
Maps are ideological representations. On the one hand, they portray accumulated modern understandings of how the world should be represented (i.e., the Arctic is on top and Antarctica on the bottom), but they also portray more specific ideological or cultural understandings. For instance, for U.S. children, the maps they have on the walls of their classrooms, with the United States front and center, are “correct” maps, while the maps that Chinese children (and adults) draw, which have China front and center, would be classified as incorrect.

A freehand map—or, more to the point, the errors in such a map--can therefore reveal where a child is in terms of content knowledge, as well as a complex of set of interrelated cognitive and cultural variables. Freehand maps provide a window into what a student knows about the world, from basic content knowledge (what are the continents and oceans), to the fundamental orienting framework of north/south and east/west, to more cognitively complex concepts of nesting and scale. Teachers can therefore use these maps as diagnostic tools in a number of ways. For although there is a steady progressive from grade level to grade level on all these axes, there is enormous variability within one grade (as well as within one classroom). Our hypothesis is that, with additional reinforcement, the students at the lower end of the scale can be brought in line with the rest of the students at their grade level, and that this will have an effect on other areas of classroom work. We have developed a simple rubric for evaluating the maps and an online tool that provides a picture of the levels of conceptual understanding of an entire classroom of students.

Click here to see a gallery of the freehand maps.