As a recent university graduate with a strong interest in geography, I was quite excited to try the geographiQ app for Android. I downloaded it from the Google store, and opened it the moment it finished downloading. I started out easy with the provinces and territories of Canada – I’ve lived in Canada my whole life. Having figured out the game play from that, I moved on to American states. That was definitely more of a challenge!
I really love that when you finish matching the states to the map, it shows you the full map, colour coded with which states you got correct and which ones you answered incorrectly. I clearly need to spend more time in New England, as that was where my most wrong answers were.This app is very intuitive. While there is little text, I found it very easy to use and to navigate. It made me realize just how limited my knowledge of geography truly is. While I have a strong grasp of North America and Western Europe, I could barely manage anything else for the rest of the world. What started out for me as a way to show off my knowledge and play a fun game has become an opportunity for me to learn more about the world I live in. This app is truly educational, even though it is a great amount of fun.I wish that I had had this app when I was younger and had to memorize all the provinces and their capitals.
This would have made the boring task of memorization much more enjoyable. There aren’t any children in my life for me to share this with, but maybe by the time there are children in my life old enough to appreciate this app, I’ll still be able to pull out my phone and show them the world.I’ve already shared this app with many of my friends, several of whom studied geography in university. They have all enjoyed it, and in truth have become quite competitive about their results. Also, this app tends to lead to conversations including sentences like “See I knew that was East Sussex because when I was fifteen I visited England and was able to…” etc… etc… My friends agree with me that the app is highly well designed, and made us realize how much more we all still had to learn about the world around us. In the future, I would love to see an upgrade for the app that keeps track of your scores.
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I think it would be really satisfying to watch scores go up as knowledge is gained and one becomes better at identifying countries, flags, counties, states, etc! I would also be interested to see a way for this app to incorporate some kind of content about the culture of the countries – maybe something to do with food, or languages spoken locally, perhaps? I would be sure to download a second edition of the app, or update it if they ever create further activities.Thank you so much for creating this fun and educational app!
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