In the wake of the Wordle maelstrom during lockdown many similar games surfaced. Though my favorite is Quordle (where the player solves four Wordles at once), I’d like to tell you about my experience playing Worldle, the Wordle for geography.
In the wake of the Wordle maelstrom during lockdown many similar games surfaced. Though my favorite is Quordle (where the player solves four Wordles at once), I’d like to tell you about my experience playing Worldle, the Wordle for geography.
Every day, the game displays the silhouette of a country and the player has six guesses to properly identify the country. Once a guess is made, the game will display the distance between the guess and the actual country – as well as the direction.
It’s a very simple game. I play it to expand my woefully shallow grasp of geography (my current knowledge of geography is limited to what Carmen Sandiego taught me – by the way, you can now play an immersive version of Carmen Sandiego that uses Google Earth). When I first started playing I had one rule – don’t cheat. Don’t look at a map. As you might imagine, my accuracy was exceedingly low. I won maybe twice in three weeks. Part of the problem was that there are close to 200 countries in the world (I know maybe only 50 of them), I don’t know what their borders look like, and I certainly have no concept of distance (is Africa 1,000 miles across, north to south? 2,000? 5,000?). Heck, I couldn’t even tell you how many oceanic miles there are between Africa and South America. And to top it off, there is no scale for context (Vatican City is as big as Russia in the game).
My strategy was to guess one of the countries I know (Australia, Peru, France, Egypt) just to get in the ballpark. If I got lucky after the first or second guess, I’d be within 1,500 miles. From there it was shots in the dark. Let’s say my guess was Egypt and the feedback I received was that the real country was southwest by 2,485 miles. This is where I would be derailed – I know maybe a handful of countries in Africa by name (there are 55, by the way!) and I honestly couldn’t tell you how far any of them are from Egypt (partly because I don’t know geography, partly because I don’t know how Worldle measures distance – is it from the center of the country I guessed to the center of the proper country? Is it from border to border, because if so that makes a difference).
More often than not I’d wind up floundering about trying to name as many countries as I could in the general area. Happily Worldle provides the right answer after the player exhausts their guesses and even links to the country in Google Maps so I can see how awful I am at geography – but hopefully remember for next time.
Recently I realized that this isn’t really the optimal strategy for learning and have since changed my algorithm. My first guess is still from a handful of strategic guesses (so I can approximate the continent) and then I’ll open up Google Maps and use that as a guide. Now at first you might read this and accuse me of cheating (to that I say, “OK – you tell me how many miles there are between Eswatini and Suriname”), but the reality is that I was learning way more by using Google Maps. It has helped me contextualize where countries are, how big continents are, and relative geographic directions. I have a better appreciation of geography; I have learned way more in the past two weeks of me adopting this strategy than a few months of playing without looking at Google Maps.
I guess there are a few lessons here. It seems I prefer the “lean-in” mode of education. I like being involved in the discovery process. I’m not sure every student does, but I endeavor to give students that opportunity. I know there will be students who will be perfectly happy with the academic analog of guessing at silhouettes, but most crave the proverbial Google Maps to help them contextualize, discover, and build connections.
This exercise has also made me recognize the invisible structural uncertainty that students are destined to encounter. In the case of Worldle, I still don’t know how distances between my guess and the actual answer are calculated. I’m honing in on it and getting more information with every guess. But now that I’m using my new method, it doesn’t really matter what the structural black box is. I’m using tools that circumvent that knowledge deficit. And I’m learning along the way. And this experience has compelled me to try to identify invisible structural knowledge gaps that students are likely to experience.
Lastly, I think context is necessary. Earlier I mentioned that in the game Vatican City is the same size as Russia (the image of the country in question fills up the screen). I know Russia extends across eleven time zones. It is gigantic. But I didn’t guess properly the day Russia was the country because I don’t know the shape of the country well enough. Had there been any indication of size I would have most certainly gotten it right. The same goes for countries that border the ocean – the game does not alert the player. If it did, I would be able to have more context for my guessing. My takeaway is that it is even more important to contextualize lessons with my students.
Thank you for playing in my geographically-impaired sandbox.
World map image by Grand Scient from Pixabay