Tuesday, June 16. 2009

Sporcle: The New Geography Game

Actually, the online quiz website, Sporcle.com, has many categories, but the geography area is particularly popular. Who's using it? College students. And, they are not using it to study per se, but for recreation and to jazz up dull geography club meetings according to the Boston Globe. Questions include:

Can you name all the countries in the world in 15 minutes? How many countries have "stan" as a suffix? Which countries share the longest borders? Which country consumes more beer, per capita, than any other? Can you name all 37 countries that contain the letters X, Y, or Z?

What pleases me most about what could be another "how nice! young people are learning geography" article is that the reporter, Don Aucoin asked actual academic geographer about the value of the game. Responses include:

"Maybe it promotes a curiosity about the world, but I think it helps to caricature geography, because it makes it a trivia game," contends Joseph Nevin, an associate professor of geography at Vassar College.
...
But James Hayes-Bohanan, an associate professor of geography at Bridgewater State, says Sporcle does attempt "a higher level of spatial thinking" by, for instance, following a question about the capitals of Africa with a question about the adjacent countries on the continent. "It piques curiosity," says Hayes-Bohanan. "Once you see the kinds of phenomena they quiz on, I hope that would inspire people to do some reading."