Georific

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Common Sense Review

Updated July 2012

Challenging geo trivia game is all over the map

Common Sense Rating 3

Teacher Rating (1 Teacher Review) 3

Price

$.99

This grade range is a recommendation by the Common Sense Education editorial team, not the developer/publisher.

Grades

8-12

Platforms

iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch

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Subjects

Social Studies

geography
historical figures
history

Skills

Critical Thinking

applying information
logic
thinking critically

Purpose

Targeted Practice

Answer historical trivia questions by finding the location on the map.
Place the marker for the answer and then see how close it is.
Chose from 7 categories and 3 difficulty levels.
Get honest feedback for good ("remarkable!"), close ("almost!"), and not-even-close ("c'mon!") answers.

Pros

High-interest topics like sports and music engage teens.

Cons

Difficulty level doesn't change the difficulty of the questions, just how many wrong answers are allowed.

Bottom Line

Challenging game teaches geography with fun interaction, but questions are more trivial than historical.

Amanda Bindel
Common Sense Reviewer
Classroom teacher

Common Sense Rating 3

Engagement Is the product stimulating, entertaining, and engrossing? Will kids want to return? 4

Georific puts a fun spin on a trivia game. Zooming around the world with clear graphics from the NASA Earth Observatory makes geography exciting, and the multiplayer option provides an element of friendly competition.

Pedagogy Is learning content seamlessly baked-in, and do kids build conceptual understanding? Is the product adaptable and empowering? Will skills transfer? 3

Incredibly challenging geography questions not only empower kids to demonstrate their knowledge, but also teach them geography. The interactive-nature of the game may help information transfer, especially when questions repeat.

Support Does the product take into account learners of varying abilities, skill levels, and learning styles? Does it address both struggling and advanced students? 4

A tutorial explains how to play, and hints are available a few times in each game. There's a local multiplayer option. Screenshots of good answers can be shared on Facebook and high scores can be posted to the Game Center.

About our ratings and privacy evaluation.

How Can Teachers Use It?

Use Georific for an in-class competition, like a geography bee. U.S. History teachers would likely find the most classroom use for the app, since there's a category for U.S. Capitals. Other categories, though interest-based, aren't specific enough to reflect a typical content area, but questions repeat frequently enough that kids can learn and retain some of the geographic information, even if it's obscure.

What's It Like?

In Georific, students answer geography-related trivia by finding and pinnng a location on a world map. Scores are based on how close to the location they get. The length of each round is determined by how many miles or kilometers away each answer is from the actual location, with the beginning level allowing more range than the hard level. Students can play in single-player mode, sharing results on Facebook if they choose, or play a multiplayer game with up to five opponents. They can choose a quiz topic from Capitals of the World, General, History, Entertainment, Sports, Music, and U.S. Federal Capitals, and they can customize the challenge -- which determines how many miles off each round's answers can be before the round ends, not the actual difficulty of the questions -- from easy, intermediate, and hard. After students pin and submit the answer, the map adjusts to show the actual location, and scores are based on how close students got, offering a word (positive, like "Georific!" or negative, like "Ouch!") of feedback. Players get four Jokers to use for hints.

Is It Good For Learning?

Even with crazy-challenging questions like "What is the capital of Andalusia?", Georific is incredibly fun. The snarky feedback for wrong answers helps kids not take the blow of being continents off too seriously, but after a bit of play, they'll actually start remembering and making sense of the geography. The questions do repeat pretty quickly, but rather than being a negative, that helps reinforce the information. Questions have lots of typos, which is distracting, and it'd be nice if players could exit a game and change the category without having to complete the whole round. It'd also be great if teachers could customize quizzes, as the information is pretty broad and beyond the scope of most high school curricula. The choices of entertainment, music, and sports add some high-interest play while still being really educational, and the history section doubles in teaching geography and history. Georific may not be perfect, but it is pretty terrific.