Ask HN: Resources for 7 year old interested in Geography | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Resources for 7 year old interested in Geography

4 pointsthookipodu4 comments

My 7 years old son seems interested in Geography. Whenever he can get hold of a computer, he googles and searches for maps. Any thoughts what I can do to help him explore more ?

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Play Carmen Sandiego and GeoGuessr with them? Or if they like board games, maybe the Pandemic series (especially the Legacy ones, which have more story and different cultures, but might be a bit advanced for a 7-year-old, depending?). Or Ticket to Ride for an easier play. Or Power Grid.

Might also be fun to play around in Google Earth (it's still around!), maybe in VR. Or make some maps together in Felt.com (easy) or QGIS (harder).

Oh, and there are a bunch of scratch-off maps you can get too (on Amazon and elsewhere). Might be fun to combine those with country-specific games, or trivia, or whatever.

There are also these books: https://brilliantmaps.com/book/ And that website has a link to other board games too: https://brilliantmaps.com/strategy-board-games/

Get him a big print-edition atlas of the world. Tactile, it's not yet-more-screen-time, and the number of maps & level of detail in a good one could occupy him for hundreds of hours.

An atlas of world history might be similarly good, to give him some sense of how the world's geography keeps changing over time.

Also just get him a physical globe.

It may be a bit challenging for a 7 year old, but get them to read “How to lie with maps” (https://www.markmonmonier.com/how_to_lie_with_maps__3rd_ed_1...), discuss it with them and set up something that allows them (possibly with some help from a grown up; I think tooling for this is still a bit nerdy) to make their own maps based on OpenStreetMap. They might want to prominently show all houses of relatives, all public playgrounds, zoos, McDonald’s, or whatever or de-emphasize or even hide roads not accessibly by bicycle, for example.

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