A New World For Geography -- Computers, Games Help Teachers Map Out More Ways To Boost Subject
The assignment: Picture the world in a unique way, using stuff from home to map the globe.
Students in Michelle Ota's eighth-grade social-studies class searched their minds and picked through refrigerators and closets for ways to represent Earth.
The soft round shape of a grapefruit held the world for one student at Seattle's Washington Middle School. Another used a softball. A third put the world on an electric wok.
Bessie Wlos created a globe on the back of a styrofoam mannequin head. She colored and adorned the front with newspaper curls. On the back, she painted continents and oceans.
"It was a different way of learning something," the 15-year-old said. "Different from what I've expected. We usually read out of books, sit at tables. It's kinda fun too, when she gives you a project. You have so many possibilities, your mind just travels."
Many children today don't have that vision. Some can't find their way around printed maps.
A national quiz of high-school seniors in 1988 found many American students lost. Only 57 percent correctly answered all the multiple-choice questions.
Although national geography achievement levels have not been set, then-U.S. Education Secretary Lauro Cavazos called the results disappointing when they were released. The results will be compared with next year's test scores.
The test found that only half of 12th-graders knew the Panama Canal cuts sailing time between New York and San Francisco.
Adults did not fare much better. In 1988 and 1989 Gallup polls, one in four could not find the Pacific Ocean on an unmarked world map. One in seven could not pinpoint the United States.
Kenneth Davis, author of "Don't Know Much About Geography: Everything You Need to Know About the World but Never Learned," points out: "The questions posed in this (Gallup) survey related to the pressing issues of national interest, such as the whereabouts of the contra rebels that our government was then funding . . . or the location of the Persian Gulf, where American vessels were then patrolling. . . ."
Instructors such as Ota are trying innovative methods to kick-start interest in geography.
They're joined in the attempt to reverse geographic illiteracy by entrepreneurs, television producers and authors offering knowledge in ways that fit in with today's audiovisual world.
Jessica Giessen, 15, says that playing geography board games such as Take Off! and watching the television show "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?" has made learning geography easier.
The 10th-grader at Hope Academy in Burien said she sees a difference in her test scores as well.
"It helps if you have a fun game and you memorize it. It helps jog it out of your memory."
Often the games offer more up-to-date geographic information than do books.
"When you can have a world map in front of you that's updated, that helps," said Tony Fabian, an eighth-grade geography teacher at Eckstein Middle School in Seattle.
The books Fabian uses are 6 years old. They are scheduled to be replaced in 1995. Worse, the school does not have enough world-geography texts to teach the one-semester class to all eighth-graders at the same time.
Jay Rayvid sees the TV show he helps produce, "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego," its computer-game predecessor and the National Geographic Society's geography bee in 46,000 schools as elements in a broad campaign to revive interest in geography.
On Rayvid's program, which attracts 6.2 million viewers weekly, the young contestants race across the world trying to nab criminal Carmen, who each episode makes off with some cherished attraction such as the St. Louis Arch, Grand Canyon or Rock of Gibraltar.
They earn points for correctly answering geography questions as they track globe-trotting Carmen.
Children are naturally interested in geography, author Davis says. He blames dry lectures and dull texts written for experts for sapping that interest.
In David Adam's classroom at Eckstein Middle School, students show up before first bell for a chance to play a Geo-Safari electronic computer game.
"Kids enjoy it, but I have two games and I see 150 kids a day. That means 148 kids won't see it," said Adams.
Fabian's classes sometimes use Take Off!, a colorful board game produced in Redmond. Some 1,200 were donated to Seattle schools.
The game requires players to fly across the globe, landing on cities like Addis Ababa, Beijing and La Paz connected by multi-colored travel routes.
Fabian said the game can be used to help students who have difficulty reading or to reward high-achieving students who finish classwork early.
"I wish we had maybe 30 of these, 32 of these in the classroom," Fabian said. Instead he and a teacher share the one game.
Fabian has seen the future at the Shoreline School District's technology lab, where teachers and students pick images from laser discs to dub onto tapes, making their own geography films.
Other computer programs allow children to create up-to-date maps or - with the click of a computer mouse - to watch changes over the years in telephone lines, railroad tracks and deforestation as the West was explored.
"The electronic tools serve as a gateway to information for kids," said Al Morasch, Shoreline Instruction Technology and Media director. The technology helps students define ideas and motivates them to continue on in their research using text sources, too.
"I could teach for another 20 years if I had those resources," Fabian said.