As a geography educator who loves trivia and finding ways to make spatial thinking entertaining, games like Geoguessr and Timeguessr are right in my wheelhouse. These videos replicate the competitive experience using spatial information, using aerial photography zoomed in to a city and slowly zooming out to see if you can recognize the city from up above. Recognizing the coast or river is often an important way to discern which city you are analyzing. Can you tell the climate from the vegetation patterns? How is the city laid out? How is this layout similar to other cities that were created in the same region? What does the transportation network say about the public policies and technological context of this city? So many clues, but only 15 second to process all of it.

Fair warning, the hard ones are quite hard. I wouldn’t recommend showing these entire video in front of a classroom without some editing…choose the examples that are more locally relevant to your students and at their difficulty level. If you do need some more difficult examples, the state capitals example is quite hard.

If you are ready to branch out from “just” cities, try this video on the 20 landmarks in the United States.

And another one…just because. Find the ones that you like, with the formal and difficult that work for your situation.

TAGS: trivia, fun.