“War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography” — Ambrose Bierce

Towards the beginning of the semester, history and geography classes often have a map quiz. These test your ability to associate names with places. For example, I took a Modern East Asia history class which had a map quiz; we had to know where Beijing, Tokyo, the Huang-He River (and so forth) go on a map.

Here are some helpers:

1. Try drawing a map. For visual learners, this can be a relatively fun, hands-on way of learning where in the world stuff is. You could copy and/or trace the shape of the region and then dot the map with all the cities and rivers you need to know.

2. Create Mnemonics. For each place create some link between the name and where it’s found on a map. For example, supposed you had to remember that Tokyo is located on the central east coast of Honshu, in Japan; you could remember this by saying to yourself, “Tokyo is the capital of Japan, so of course its located in the middle of Japan’s largest island; and it is located on the east coast because it is the capital of the land of the rising sun, and the sun rises in the east.” This may seem cludgy, but it works wonders.

3. Create a matching game. You could write down the names of the places in one column and their location in another column, randomizing the order of both columns. Then you could draw a line between each place-name and its location.

4. Grab a globe. You could practice finding the places on a globe. You could even turn this into a game by timing yourself.

5. Play Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego. You could dust off that old bondi blue iMac, crank up good ‘ole Mac OS 8, and plug in your old external floppy disk drive for hours of gumshoe goodness. Or maybe not.