News, tips and tricks

There is an entertaining (and extremely addictive) game based on Google Street View called GeoGuessr. Our task is simple: we are dropped off somewhere in the world, at random, and we must guess on the world map in the top-right corner where we think that place could be.

In GeoGuessr, we can walk up and down the area with the Streetview app until we discover some kind of signal (such as signs or people). I used it in one of my lessons to practise intelligent speculation and teach forming conditional sentences.

Not surprisingly, it turned out work quite well. Students also enjoyed playing with GeoGuessr in the computer room. Moreover, teaching is efficient when the game is projected in front of the class. In this case, everybody was busy with the same picture and I was the one clicking on the page. Additionally, the game often assists when teaching geography, as in many instances it is only the local plant life that helps us define the location’s whereabouts.

As a final step, we can make our guess and the system lets us know just how accurate our guess was. Visibly, we accumulate points for our guesses (1 game consists of 5 locations) and at this stage we can also learn the actual locations. Here we played by saying (or collecting) 5 famous writers coming from the country in question. I suppose it could even be possible to organize a treasure hunt that lasts for a few hours based on GeoGuessr, with various exercises.