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Reach the World’s GeoGames (0 comments)
Play Game >> Age Range Ages 3 and up
Brief Description
Can you build the globe in less than three minutes? Give your world geography skills a test with Reach the World’s GeoGames, an online, interactive suite of geography-learning games based on research at Teachers College, Columbia University and funded originally by the National Geographic Society Education Foundation.
Release Date December 2007Developer Reach the World and Dangerous Media, with underwriting support from the National Geographic Society Education Foundation
Project Lead Heather Halstead, Executive Director, Reach the World
Press Coverage Press Release URL
http://www.reachtheworld.org/geogames/Geogames_Press-Release-2007.html
Full Description
Can you build the globe in less than three minutes? Give your world geography skills a test with Reach the World’s GeoGames (v. 2.0), an online, interactive suite of geography-learning games funded originally by the National Geographic Society Education Foundation. RTW’s GeoGames are a proven tool for teaching world geography, backed by academic research from Teachers College, one of the world’s leading educational institutions.
Reach the World is now embarking upon the development of GeoGames 3.0. RTW envisions transforming GeoGames from a single-player, Flash-based game into a family of educational games for an online community of educators, parents, and students. The development plan includes versions for mobile devices and the addition of video into the gaming experience.
In GeoGames 3.0, new games will be developed to address issues such as climate change, macro-economics and population statistics. All countries and capitals will be available on the rotatable/3D globe. Players will be able to create user accounts, track scores, and customize the regions of the Earth that they play with.
Reach the World’s GeoGames are not just an idea on paper; they are a proven tool that is being used in real classrooms by real teachers. GeoGames 3.0 will be an opportunity to make a meaningful investment in one of the most important areas of education: world geography. The products produced from the next GeoGames development cycle will make a measurable impact on geography education nation- and world-wide.
Purpose
World geography skills are an essential part of the broad set of practical skills needed to create an informed citizenry, especially in today’s global society. In 2004, approximately 20 percent of U.S. GDP resulted from international trade, which points to the fact that many U.S. workers need geographic knowledge to participate in today’s global economy. Geography can also be a door to opportunity; the geospatial technologies industry is now one of the three fastest-growing industries in the U.S. and provides more than 75,000 new job hires per year. If our education system fails to instill in students a deep understanding of world human and physical geography, then they will be unequipped to participate fully in today’s knowledge-driven, global community and economy.
Geography is the only subject among the nine core academic disciplines that does not receive federal appropriations under the 2002 No Child Left Behind education law. An increasing number of studies, however, are demonstrating the value of geography not only as a stand-alone subject, but also as a tool for teaching other core subjects, such as literacy. Children begin to develop their vocabulary and reading skills early in life. By the Second Grade, there are tremendous disparities in the numbers of words children know. A good vocabulary is vital to reading comprehension; an impoverished vocabulary negatively affects a student’s progress. Reading and writing are often taught in isolation from the other subjects, but a 2006 study on geography and vocabulary development disputes this approach. This study found that for children whose low reading levels precluded reading to learn, explorations of geography content provided an effective means for them to internalize new vocabulary and read expository texts confidently. Another study, What Works in Geography Education (2006), found that integration of geography and literacy in elementary school improved student achievement in literacy by five percent. The study also showed similar results in mathematics. These and other studies show that integrating geography with reading, writing, and math instruction not only gives children more opportunities to make sense of their world, but can also improve their performance in other core subject areas.
Geography education can also have an affective impact on how students think and feel about the peoples and cultures of our world. We live in an increasingly diverse society and an ever more interconnected world. If we expect young students to become responsible adult citizens of their nation and their world, they need knowledge about people different from them. Attitudes affect behavior, and therefore the affective outcomes of learning play a critical, and overlooked, role in students’ development. In 2006, Affective Outcomes of a World Geography Course examined the affective impact of a 9th Grade world geography course on students. The results showed that by the end of the course, there was a statistically significant, positive change in students’ characterizations of five world regions. Of particular interest was the fact that at the beginning of the course, 79.1 percent of the students characterized the Middle East negatively (20 percent more negative than any other region). By the end of the course, only 58.2 percent did so. These percentages point to the affective influence that media can have on how students perceive and relate to world regions. They also show how critical it is for teachers to expose students to even-handed instruction about the world’s cultures, especially those that are in the media’s spotlight. The affective outcomes of learning are not usually stated among the goals of a course. They arguably, however, play an important role in the way students think about, and ultimately relate to, our increasingly global society. This study points to the important role geography education can play in developing students’ tolerance and understanding.
At present, many factors make it urgently necessary for programs like Reach the World and games like GeoGames to grow within the public school system. The most important factor is the impact that the No Child Left Behind education law is having on public education. Since the passage of NCLB in 2002, the emphasis on high-stakes testing in low-performing public schools has increased so dramatically that the other subjects are disappearing from the curriculum. A recent survey by the Center on Education Policy (CEP) found that since the passage of NCLB, 71 percent of the nation’s 15,000 school districts had reduced the hours of instructional time spent on other subjects in order to focus more on reading and math. This practice is now so widespread that it has earned its own moniker: “narrowing the curriculum”.
The “narrowing the curriculum” trend is strongest in low-performing schools. The CEP study found that 29 percent of elementary school principals reported decreases in time for social studies, civics and geography since the passage of NCLB. This figure rises to 47 percent, however, in high minority elementary schools. The level of funding a school receives is linked to its average scores on the standardized literacy and mathematics tests. As a result, the emphasis on standardized testing is now so strong that many of the struggling public schools bar their lowest-performing students from taking anything except math and reading in an effort to bring their test scores up. This testing culture has led to a rising need for programs like Reach the World that fit into the mandated curriculum and connect at-risk students to engaging, interdisciplinary content about our global community.
MetricsHow are you measuring results?
The ability to interpret maps is considered a fundamental component of geographic literacy, but the ability to “conjure up” such maps has fallen out of favor in recent years. Beginning in 2003, as part of the foundation work for the development of GeoGames, teachers at different New York City elementary and middle schools were asked to have their students respond to the following prompt: “Draw a map of the world. Put in all the important places you can think of.” Although we could have used other assessments, we chose to use freehand maps because it seemed to us that they would elicit what the students really “knew” about world geography. (For existing research on using freehand maps as tools for assessing geographic knowledge, see particularly Wise and Kon 1990, Metz 1990, Wiegand and Stiell 1996, Saarinen 1973 and 2001, all of whom worked with students in higher grades. For concerns about the difficulties in analyzing such maps, see Saveland 1978, and Kitchin and Freundschub 2000.) Since virtually every elementary school classroom in the United States has a world map prominently displayed up on the wall, often with a globe nearby, and since these maps were there for the students to look at as they responded to the prompt, we expected that the results would be rough approximations of the traditional wall map. We immediately found that this was not the case, certainly not for younger students and not even for many upper-elementary and some middle-school students. Instead, as the students struggled to translate what the world “looks like” to paper, they drew maps that had little discernable relationship to the maps up on the wall. It was clear from the hundreds of maps that we collected that by upper elementary school, many (but by no means all) students were beginning to draw traditional maps, but that at all grade levels there was enormous variability, both among the students in any one class and among students at the same grade level in different schools. Some of this variation is cognitive - children do develop at different rates - but some of it is related to academic level, to how geography is taught in the classroom, and to each child’s own life experiences. In the first study report (2005), we analyzed these student maps in terms of six key concepts that we believe that a student needs in order to draw a traditional map. These were the map frame, the shape and placement of objects (i.e., land masses) in the map, the orientation of these objects, the spatial relationships among them, the nesting of objects within objects, and the scale of the different objects. Thus a student who does not understand how to form a map on paper (frame), how to draw continents and countries and where to place them (shape), that North America is above South America (orientation), where the continents are in relation to each other or where the oceans are in relation to land masses (spatial relationships), that a city is a unit within a country and a country is a unit within a continent (nesting), or that some oceans are vastly larger than some continents (scale) - such a student will not be able to draw a “traditional” map. The types of freehand maps drawn by young school children not only provide important insights for researchers in geography learning, but also can be an important tool for geography educators. We also came to believe that this process could be nudged along if students spent more time actively engaged with maps and mapping - not local maps but world maps, not drawing a neighborhood but creating entire worlds. With generous support from the National Geographic Society Education Foundation, we worked to develop an interactive, online set of mapping exercises called GeoGames. In playing GeoGames, the user builds a globe, first adding continents, then countries, cities, rivers, and mountains. The scaffolding, or order of activities, was designed to help students with all six concepts listed above, but particularly with shape, orientation, nesting, as well as with content.
What outcomes have been measured?
GeoGames was developed in 2006 and underwent a series of usability tests and revisions, with teachers and then with students, in Spring 2007. In Fall 2007, we began an evaluation in a series of 3rd-, 4th-, and 5th-grade classrooms whose teachers agreed to use GeoGames with their students, comparing them to classrooms at the same grade levels in which the teachers agreed not to use the games. As an assessment of the impact of using GeoGames, students in both sets of classrooms were asked to draw freehand maps of the world, responding to the same prompts used in the previous research, once in Fall 2007, before they began to use GeoGames, and then again in late Spring 2008. As outlined earlier, our data comes from maps drawn at the beginning of the year and again at the end of the year in five 3rd-grade classrooms (two GeoGames, three non-GeoGames), six 4th-grade classrooms (four GeoGames and two non-GeoGames) and four 5th-grade classrooms (two GeoGames and two non-GeoGames). Sample Results: • We looked first at the percent of students who drew non-maps at the beginning of the year and then drew Traditional maps at the end of the year. The data shows that all those classrooms where over 50 percent of the students converted to Traditional maps were GeoGames classrooms, and this was the case whether they had a low or a high percentage of non-maps at the beginning of the year. • If we next look the classrooms where over 50 percent converted one step - from non-maps to Island maps - we see that this was much more common and happened in GeoGames and non-GeoGames classrooms alike. • However, if we look at the remaining one-step conversion - from Island maps to Traditional maps - we see that the highest conversion rates here were also almost entirely in GeoGames classrooms. • If we look at those where there was no conversion - where the students drew non-maps and Island maps at the beginning of the year and again at the end of the year - we see that these were mostly non-GeoGames classrooms. • In terms of the amount of detail and the correct placement of that detail, the Traditional maps drawn by students in non-GeoGames classrooms did not improve overall - and even went backward - while the Traditional maps drawn by the students in GeoGames classrooms included much more detail (more places) and had more examples of correct nesting, even in the 3rd grade, where nesting is a particularly difficult concept. • Looking at the differences between the GeoGames and non-GeoGames classrooms in terms of content, and trying to understand not only the classrooms that progressed but those that hardly progressed at all or even went backwards, suggests that one of the benefits of using GeoGames may be what we can call “stickiness” - the idea that playing the game may help places “stick” in the minds of the students, rather than popping in and fading out again. • Two teachers reported that they had students play against each other and the clock, and found that students came to class early or went on the computer during lunch in order to improve their times. Although we did not have enough maps to make a comparison, their year-end maps included a large percentage of Traditional maps. • Numerous teachers noted that GeoGames had helped the students with difficult concepts. For instance, one 5th-grade teacher wrote that the game helped her students distinguish between countries and cities - something that many of them had been unable to do. All of the teachers wrote that using the mapping exercise and then GeoGames helped them realize how much their students did not know and that they needed to teach more of the basics of geography.
Non-Profit involved: yes
Funding Sources: The development and evaluation of GeoGames versions 1.0 and 2.0 were funded in full by a grant to Reach the World from the National Geographic Society
Sponsors/In-kind donations: Dangerous Media donated considerable in-kind services in the lead-up to GeoGames and has provided pro bono support to the product since its launch in 2006.
Budget
Overall: 250,000 (Reach the World is about to launch the development cycle for GeoGames 3.0. For proposed improvements and additions to GeoGames, please see the descriptions below.)
Social Issues/Channels Economics, Poverty, Youth-Produced, Other Game Tags
geogames, geography, geography games, geography tools, games, gaming, educational games, educational geography games, interactive games, interactive geography games
Where you can play this game http://www.reachtheworld.org/geogames/index.html Requires Flash enabled browser.
Contacts
General Heather Halstead, heather@reachtheworld.org
Press Heather Halstead, heather@reachtheworld.org
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