Carmen San Diego Stand Aside

image courtesy of wikipedia

Technology and educational gaming has made some leaps since Carmen San Diego first graced our PCs.  I remember playing the original Where in the World is Carmen San Diego? on the glorious orange monochrome of the Casper monitor we had in the mid to late 80's.  I played some of the  sequels such as Where in the USA is Carmen San Diego? at my best friend's house in glorious full color VGA.  In the early to mid 90's I watched the TV show and can still hum some bars of the theme song.  Carmen San Diego made learning about geography fun.  That may still be the case today.  You can download Carmen San Diego Returns for PC and iOS.  However, if you want to save a couple of bucks, there are two websites that are the most fun I've had with geography since hunting for that red-trench-coated  criminal mastermind.

A random spot on the planet where a road happens to be.

The sites are GeoGuessr (www.geoguessr.com) and Earth-Picker (www.earth-picker.com).  Instead of using clues provided to find what country or state or even part of space (Really! Where in Space is Carmen San Diego? 1993) an elusive Latina is hiding, these two sites drop you in a random location anywhere in the world mapped by Google Maps.  You are presented a location in a Google Street View.  You may navigate around turning, going forwards and backwards, but you may not zoom out into an overhead view.  An overhead map of the entire world is shown in the corner of the screen and the object of the game is to place a pin as close to the location of the street view as possible.  The closer you are, the less points you get.  Games on both sites take the sum of the distances you're off from the actual location for 5 rounds.  Like golf, the lower your score, the better.  There are of course leader boards for folks that choose to sign in.  Don't be confused initially like I was though by the high low scores though.  Both sites were made by European programmers that use decimals instead of commas and vice versa.

To get as close as possibly to the actual locations presented, the player can navigate around and search for clues such as road signs, business names, topography, flora, fauna, etc. that would help them find where on the planet he or she is.  It can be quite challenging especially since Google Street View isn't limited to just streets.  While Earth-Picking I've been placed inside of temples and also museums.

These games are a great way to learn about other places, unfamiliar places, ones where you would never visit as a tourist.  These two games develop observational skills, reasoning, logic, and deduction.  While the player may not be tracking down Carmen or her V.I.L.E agents, or finding where she had hidden the Eiffel Tower or all the sushi in Japan, GeoGuessr and/or Earth-Picker are both great fun and a valuable tool for learning geography through observation and exploration.