Spark Inquiry With Geoguessr & Geosettr

Geoguessr is a fun and challenging geography game based on Google’s Street View imagery. The game presents players with imagery of a location in Street View and the player then has to guess where where in the world that place is. Some challenges are easier than others, but none are actually easy. To guess correctly players need to study the imagery for little clues that tip-off the location.

While investigating the imagery in Geoguessr your students may become curious about the things they’re seeing. Then when they finally guess and discover the correct answers they may become even more curious about what they’re seeing. I recently saw this happen with a group of adults to whom I had just introduced Geoguessr. They quickly started investigating the Street View imagery in detail and asking questions like “what is the language on that billboard?”

If you don’t want to leave the entire activity up to chance, you can create your own Geoguessr activities through Geosettr. Through Geosettr you choose the locations you want displayed and the clues that students can see. This could be a fun way to begin a unit of study about a continent or region. For example, if I was starting a unit of study about South America I might include Street View imagery of Christ The Redeemer in the Geosettr game that I create for my students.