Making a game to memorize facts about every country | Hacker News Reader

Making a game to memorize facts about every country

carltheperson.com

91 pointscarltheperson29 comments

Suggest to make small countries more discoverable. There are some countries I couldn't locate during the "memorized" phase. I'm on mobile so the screen size may be limited

I agree. I was on a big screen an some of the smaller countries were still impossible to see for me. Like some of the smaller islands are probably just a couple pixels. A dot of color or a circle around them would probably work better than a simple yellow fill.

I fully agree. It is currently very annoying to get a small island nation.

I like the concept. Even though I wouldn't bother with flags, but trying to locate a country based on its name is a very good exercise for everybody.

I would really appreciate an option to skip flags and only ask about name and location.

That said, this is a really cool project. Thanks a lot for making and posting it!

That is something I have been working on. qquiz.com

Here's a tip:

You should never have a button suddenly change functions underneath a user's cursor without any warning -- ESPECIALLY while doing a repetitive task.

Noted. Thanks for the tip (:

The Anki deck Ultimate Geography is pretty much this game and more:

https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/2109889812

It works on the phone with AnkiDroid too.

I was going to link this as well. The app in the link is nice, but Anki is way more conducive for this task.

If you frame it as witnesses and informants giving you clues where a criminal has fled, this would also be essentially the same as the first Carmen Sandiego games.

I didn't know about Ultimate Geography and have been using https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/2915332392 deck instead. UG looks like a moderate upgrade over this deck.

I do prefer the maps in the deck that I linked to though. Both have their pros and cons, but I get a better feel for the location of the place from these maps compared to the UG ones (at least the ones in the sample notes).

Very nice, thank you!

This is great Carl! Glad I follow you on Twitter as I missed this on HN.

I too have really wanted something like this for a long time (have some ideas about extra difficult parts like learning to draw the outline of a country) and really enjoyed playing it! I just did one round and got to a score of 123 but had a wonderful time. Well done on the great game!

A few suggestions: 1. This is mentioned already and I see you're aware, but it can be very hard to find somewhere like British Indian Ocean Territory 2. The dropdown options seems to be correct on the default option a good bit more than you would expect by chance. 3. The app doesn't seem to keep a long term history of ones I've seen, so got shown some—Comoros and Papau New Guinea were particular offenders for me 4. Sometimes I think you can cheat using the hover tooltips? 5. Dropdown options are sometimes pretty easy as there is only one option that you have actually encountered. 6. The flag dropdown could be bigger—some flags are hard to distinguish when they're small

And the final suggestion that is (presumably, though I could be wrong) out of your control: There are too many Guineas! C'mon planet earth, get creative.

I also did really enjoy hunting for the small (but not too small) islands and think that will lodge them better in my brain! And thanks again for making and sharing your game—really appreciate it and I learned a lot!! :) Think I'll be coming back for more!

I watched Cheers religiously when it was on and there was an episode where Coach was helping Sam study for a geography test. His trick was to remember facts with songs and because of that episode, I know Albania borders on the Adriatic, is mountainous, and chief export is chrome.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-F_tT-q8EF0

Their chief export is a web browser?

13.2% of Albania's exports in 2019 were leather footwear, 54.8% of which went to Italy, just across the Adriatic. Chromium ore was only 2.2% of exports (and 96.6% went to China).

https://oec.world/en/visualize/tree_map/hs92/export/alb/all/...

Also, if you look closely at that video you can see that "Sam" is actually Ted Danson who is an actor and not a retired alcoholic baseball player who owns a bar.

Just a little remark, a few times I was just clicking "memorized" for several countries and didn't notice when it was actually a question, and clicked "submit" by error.

I think there should be more difference between the "memorized" and the "submit" buttons.

The game also considers French overseas territories as "countries" and uses some local flag for some.

Keep up the awesome work, Carl!

I absolutely also loved your house building post. For people that didn't read it yet: https://carltheperson.com/posts/my-house/

Your world view is awesome and I especially admire it from a person your age.

In grad school in a class on the Semantic Web, we created a very simple iOS flashcard game that used flags, animals, monuments, and a few other details to help kids remember details about countries. It was a good exercise to pull all of these bits together using Linked Data, although I am not sure how well it would have scaled.

I have a video of it somewhere ...

ETA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vev_2MATqNQ

Thank you. I think I'll actually use this. A small suggestions: when asking to recall a country name (or flag), only show choices from the already presented countries.

Kinda fun.

A couple suggestions:

1. It would be great to add Capital Cities and perhaps population numbers also. And make each data-type optional. Eg, so that one could learn/quiz about Countries and Capital Cities only (no flags, location, or population) if desired.

2. The map needs to zoom in when showing a country. Sometimes I couldn't even see the country.

Does anyone remember a 90s Encyclopedia CD-ROM that featured a game where the player is presented with photos from different countries and has to guess the origin? That game was foundational for me and I can't find any reference to it.

Here is similar project https://youtu.be/sLqXFF8mlEU

Cool project, you can also add the option to guess the population and have a scoreboard of who was the least wrong.

Why do the Flags not show up ?

The default font for emojis on Windows doesn't support flags — they're replaced by the national identifier letters. Frustrating!

https://newbedev.com/flag-emojis-not-rendering

newbedev just copies from stackoverflow, see original: https://stackoverflow.com/a/54663926

Ignoring CC-BY-SA for profit...

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