This is the Wildcat GeoGame’s last quarter — for real, this time
Daily file photo by Alison Albeda
A coupon for a free Blaze Pizza, the reward for answering 40 questions correctly in the Wildcat GeoGame. The game is running for one last quarter.
September 22, 2021
The Wildcat GeoGame — an online geography trivia game hosted on The Daily’s website — is back for one last quarter.
Northwestern students have engaged with the GeoGame over 1.5 million times since its creation in 2016. If players answer 40 geography questions correctly in the span of the quarter, they can win a free Blaze Pizza. Though game organizers previously announced that Spring 2021 would be the game’s final quarter, they found they had enough coupons left for one more round.
The game is designed to educate — participants can search the answers online before submitting their answers, and there’s no penalty for getting questions wrong.
GeoGame founder and Medill Prof. Candy Lee said she was inspired to create the game after she surveyed 500 students around campus to see how many of them could point out Kenya, Nigeria, Syria, Haiti and Uruguay on a map. She found very few could identify all five.
“We’re very much a global campus,” Lee, a member of the Students Publishing Company board of directors, said. “Encouraging geography literacy seemed to me to be very important.”
The GeoGame asks participants one question a day about a fact that pertains to a specific location, Lee said. After participants answer the question, the game prompts them to identify the location on a map.
Lee created the GeoGame with Northwestern IT Services & Support Media and Design, Research Computing Services and University Libraries. The game is supported from the Buffett Institute, Study Abroad Office, Office of the Provost and The Daily.
Though NU has funded the Blaze coupons for the past five years, the University is no longer funding the rewards in the future, which is why the game will conclude after this quarter.
“We’ve had a good long run of it,” Lee said. “We’ve been able to show that people have increased their geography literacy, which has been great, and we’ve had fun.”
Email: [email protected]
Twitter: @waverly_long
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