InstaMaps

Games · for teachers and librarians

Geography games for the classroom

Three free daily games for US geography and data literacy. No accounts, no student names, nothing to install. Each takes one to two minutes, so they fit the start of a lesson.

📊 States Higher or Lower

Does Oklahoma have more tornadoes per person than Texas? Ten higher-or-lower questions made of real counts.

What it practises: Per-person rates, why big states don't always win, and where the data comes from (NOAA, USGS, EPA, ATF, FAA).

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📍 Beat the Geocoder

Five real addresses, written as messily as people type them. Drop a pin, then see how close the machine got.

What it practises: Reading an address, US geography without labels, and how computers turn text into a place.

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🚪 Find the Front Door

Maps put an address in the middle of a building. Drivers need the door. Find it on five buildings a day.

What it practises: Reading a map from above: streets, paths, parking, and which way a building faces.

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Practice by topic

Ten States Higher or Lower questions on one dataset, with different states each time. Good for a unit on weather, energy or the economy.

🌪️ Tornadoes since 1950🌬️ Wind turbines☀️ Large solar farms🏭 Coal plants still running☣️ Superfund sites🎖️ Military bases🪖 Army bases🚆 Amtrak stations🚁 Heliports🔒 Prisons and jails🔫 Licensed gun dealers⛳ Golf courses🏥 Critical access hospitals⛷️ Ski areas🧵 Joann stores that closed💊 Rite Aid stores that closed🏷️ Big Lots stores that closed🛒 Costco warehouses🥦 Whole Foods stores🐔 Chick-fil-A restaurants🍔 In-N-Out restaurants

Questions to start a discussion

  1. Wyoming has more coal plants per person than any other state. What would you need to know before deciding whether that means Wyoming burns the most coal?
  2. Small states often top the per-person lists. When is "per person" the fair comparison, and when would "per square mile" be fairer?
  3. North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas lead on tornadoes per person, ahead of Oklahoma and Texas. Is that because more tornadoes happen there, or because fewer people live there? How could you tell?
  4. Why might a state with few people have many heliports or critical access hospitals per person? (Think about distances to the nearest big hospital.)
  5. In Beat the Geocoder, which addresses were hardest for you, and which were hardest for the computer? Were they the same ones?
  6. An address with a ZIP code but no city is easy for a computer and hard for a person. Why?
  7. In Find the Front Door, what on the map told you which side the door was on? Would a delivery driver use the same clues?

Where the data comes from

States Higher or Lower uses the counts behind our 50-state rankings, each from a named public source: NOAA (tornadoes since 1950), the USGS wind turbine and solar databases, the EIA (coal plants), the EPA (Superfund sites), the Defense Department (military bases), the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (Amtrak stations), the FAA (heliports), Homeland Security (prisons and jails), the ATF (licensed gun dealers), CMS (critical access hospitals), OpenStreetMap and OpenSkiMap, and AllThePlaces for store chains. Per-person rates use the Census Bureau's 2024 state populations. Beat the Geocoder uses public places only: landmarks and stores, never homes or customer data.

What we keep

No accounts, no names, no email. Scores and streaks stay in the student's own browser. We count plays and scores without names to see how the games are doing. Find the Front Door's last round each day is a "help" round: where a player clicks is kept, without a name, so that when many players agree we learn where a door is.

For your library guide or class page

A line you can paste:

InstaMaps Games (get-instamaps.com/games): three free daily US geography games made of public data. States Higher or Lower compares states per person; Beat the Geocoder asks you to place real addresses on a map with no labels; Find the Front Door teaches reading a map from above. No accounts.

Or put a game right on the page: each game's page has an embed code at the bottom.