How my kids learned geography
Map, by Jasper Johns
One of the biggest gripes about US students is that they have no sense of geography.
I have a six-year-old who knows every state by it’s shape, so I thought I’d tell you how he learned it: From video games.
First, he was in the car one day searching for a new app on my iPhone. He went to top ten downloads for kids, and found one about states. He didn’t really want to learn about states, but he was sick of playing Angry Birds and Battle Bears and he couldn’t find anything else.
So he played Stack the States in the car for three days. I played with him, impressing him with my knowledge of state capitals. And he learned to pronounce tough words like Boise and Pierre because he had to read the question out loud to me to get help with the answer.
Then, he got a 3DS and it has this plaza where you can meet other kids, as avatars. Every morning the kids wake up and see which states the people in the plaza are from. This morning, only one state was colored in, and my son said, “Look! Someone visited from Tennessee!” That’s when I realized that during our experiment with unlimited video games we have been accidentally studying geography intensively.
Stack the States is terrific – my 8 year old loves it and has learned most of her states.
My. thoughts. exactly. We love Stack the States. I realized I how awesome it is when I watched my 5 year old name and place all 50 states on the map.
The Animaniacs videos are fun too for learning countries or states & capitals.
Also, there’s Stack the Countries which is excellent as well.
Thanks to this post, I learned about the artist Jasper Johns and found this piece of art (Map) is at the Museum of Modern Art (even though it’s not currently being displayed – http://goo.gl/Ttb7c ).
So I wanted to see if I could find some detail images on the web. Not the same as in person but it would have to suffice. Here’s the link to a search within the MOMA art project [NYC] Flickr group for Jasper Johns’s Map painting – http://goo.gl/Y42RU .
What do you think about video games hitting up all three areas of learning: visual, auditory, and kinesthetic?
I love this! Thank you for sharing.
My current geeky teacher app for the iphone is SkyView. Point the phone (from inside your house even!) anywhere and it labels the constellations and planets that are in that direction.
We also like Stack the States, though in general, we tend to use http://www.sheppardsoftware.com/ for our geography games.
SkyView works on the iPhone? For some reason I thought it just worked on the iPad – but I’m a little tech challenged sometimes :) I’ll have to check it out tonight. Thanks!
I think it also helps that you let you kids have lots of moments of boredom. That when I see the most creativity in my kids and the most willingness to explore new things.
My daughter who is 5 (soon to turn 6) has a geography obsession. She loves to play the computer games World and History Explorer by DK Publishing. She also is for hours on the Discovery and National Geographic websites.
In case you haven’t heard of these, the Scrambled States of America book and DVD are really fun. They also have a similiar board game.
Thanks for sharing about the Stack the States game. I know both my kids will really like it.
I meant to ask this when you originally posted about not limiting video games. How do you feel about television/YouTube/Netflix? Would you follow the same principle? I guess watching us a lot more passive than playing…
Love the art work and now I’m doing to get that app! My son is working hard on geography and I just know this game will be just the ticket!
The gripe is not that they don’t know anything about geography, it’s that they don’t know anything about non US geography. “Stack the States” won’t help that.
I would love to find a “Stack the States” for world geography. Kids in the US don’t know nearly enough around the world outside of their own country. Actually no, it’s not just kids… that goes for almost everyone living in the US. How can we talk about global issues (war, poverty, global warming, natural disasters) if we can’t even picture the place or the people? Anyone know of an app for that?
Study Earth’s physical geography, geology and climate, political boundaries, demographics, economics, and social statistics with this app as described in a blog post by the developer – http://blog.wolframalpha.com/2012/09/13/introducing-the-wolfram-geography-course-assistant/ .
haven’t tried it yet but WolframAlpha is well known for its’ computational knowledge engine and Mathematica software.