Try GeoGuessr in Any Class

I am totally obsessed with GeoGuessr. Have you played yet? GeoGuessr drops you somewhere in the world in Google street view and after looking around to find clues, you have to guess your exact location on a map. The closer you are to the exact location, the more points you’ll get in a round. Five rounds make up a whole game. There are lots of different ways to play! GeoGuessr has single player mode, challenge mode, and even a daily challenge. Single player mode has 5 different locations with no time limit on how long you browse around and try to collect clues. The daily challenge has a time limit of 3 minutes per round. Want to challenge your friends? Add friends to your GeoGuessr “explorer friends,” and choose a map to challenge them! Once you’ve selected a map you can type in your friend’s names and choose how long you want each round to last. The maximum time can be set to 10 minutes. If you are just looking for a friendly match, you can also choose no time limit. It’s a highly addicting game that encourages critical thinking for all ages. 

After you start playing GeoGuessr, you’ll immediately start to think about how you can bring it’s fun and excitement into your classroom. There are lots of opportunities to explore with Geoguessr in classrooms of all ages and subject areas! You can use ready made maps or you can create your own map depending on your needs. Here are some ideas for using GeoGuessr in the classroom. 

Social Studies

1. Working in a whole group, display a round of GeoGuessr. Navigate through the image and have students collect facts or observations from each place. They can brainstorm them verbally or written on individual post-it notes. Next, create categories from the facts you have collected. What do the facts have in common? Consider things like: geographic features, house structure, written language, climate, and clothing. 

2. Introduce the 5 Themes of Geography (location, place, human-environment interaction, movement, and region) and have students collect facts on a graphic organizer that demonstrate each theme. GeoGuessr Detectives!

3. Teach research through GeoGuessr. In pairs, students work on two devices. The first device will display the GeoGuessr game and the second device will be for research. Allow students to research the clues they come across and see who can get the closest to the exact location. Have the students cite or save the websites that help them find the location. 

ELA 

1. Teaching a lesson on making inferences? GeoGuessr can help you with that! Have students collect clues and talk about how what they already know can help them guess the location. If they see lots of trees, they might be in a forest. What are some possible locations based on the information you are able to gather? 

2. Write a story about where you’ve been dropped. Incorporate facts from the location to add interesting details to your story. 

3. Teaching about levels of questioning? Have students write questions about the location and distinguish between basic and critical thinking questions. Research the answers! 

Math 

1. After each round, GeoGuessr will tell you how many miles or kilometers your guess was from the exact location. Have students record the distances and find the mean of their guesses. 

2. How about the average of the whole class? Graph the averages of individuals, pairs or the whole class. Convert the average from miles to kilometers. 

3. Extra EXTRA Math: Want to know how GeoGuessr determines the score for your guesses? Check out this activity from Desmos. (This is a high level Math activity, not for the faint of heart) 

Science 

1. Studying weather and climate? Create your own map and visit different areas of the world. Have students discuss the differences between the places you have chosen. 

2. Compare and contrast biomes from different areas of the world. Ask students what they notice between them.

3. Explore rock formations in different areas of the world. It’s like a virtual field trip!