National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis

Color Your World is the latest addition to the set of resources developed by the Secondary Education Project of the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA.) The Secondary Education Project has been supporting efforts to bring the great educational potential of geographic information systems (GIS) to the K-12 schools. Color Your World is an interactive Geographic Information System (GIS) based computer game that exposes students to fundamental and essential geographic information that is necessary for understanding not only geography but politics, economics, demography, and other interesting information about our world. The game is designed so that students can play it over and over again and continue to learn from the experience of simply playing the game. Just as writing cannot be accomplished without the mastery of letters, spelling, words, and grammar; geographical communication requires that one have a basic working knowledge of the names, locations, and attributes of the countries of the world. In addition, the game exposes students to thematic maps which display patterns and distributions of important phenomena. This module/game introduces students to geographic data and the geographic information system, ArcView 2.0 which is a commercially available GIS produced by ESRI.