geoquiz: how mr nelson's geography tests became a map game
I made a geography game and you should play it. It's called Meridian71, a geography quiz, and you guess countries, states and provinces by their shape, their flag, or their capital. I rebuilt the whole thing in a day. I'll get to the day part, because the day part is the brag inside the brag, but first I have to tell you about Mr Nelson, who is the reason any of this exists.
Mr Nelson taught sixth grade geography and was feared. His expectations elevated past the point most of us thought was legal. The man wanted pages. Not concepts, whole sheets, memorized by rote, and I rose to it the way a kid rises to anything with a grade attached. Less impressive than it sounds. Children memorize the Torah; a six-page list of capitals is well within the species' abilities. I was memorizing which blob of coastline had which name, and I aced his tests, and the names stuck, and the names opened the world, even if only by name.
Years later my kid's nanny told me she was from Eritrea, and I could find her on a map, and better than that I knew a little about why and how the country exists at all, the long sore business of Ethiopia and the coast it lost. I know Oman sits on the Arabian Peninsula, not, as I may once have implied, inside Saudi Arabia, a slip Mr Nelson would have caught, or possibly not, which means he was overly tolerant. The shapes he drilled into me are still in there decades after the empty paper maps.
I first made an atlas game about ten years ago, in jQuery. This new one is Vite and React and TypeScript, wrapped with Capacitor so it runs on your phone, and it's a sibling of the Magnitude71 games portal. I wrote it with Claude in a day. The game can hand you a highlighted shape with a little zoomed locator inset and ask something like Which department is this? for Colombia, and when you miss one the Review queue brings it back around until it sticks. Mr Nelson's pages of notes had no shapes and no second chance.
Which leaves me somewhere Mr Nelson would have an opinion about. The project got easier to build and simpler to play, both, and his page of notes is still the hardest thing.