Students Win National Geography Contest

The globe in Jason Carpenter’s classroom talks.

Push a colored spot and an electronic voice spouts population data, calculates distances between two points and sings national anthems.

It’s a nifty modern touch, but Carpenter’s fifth-graders at the private Valley School often know the answers before they hear them. The $400 computerized globe was their prize for being one of six classes to win a nationwide geography contest.

“My class gets tough on this stuff,” Carpenter said. “It’s one of the areas that they happen to excel in.”

The Weekly Reader, a scholastic periodical, sponsored the Where’s Georgeo? contest, which asked fifth- and sixth-graders to identify the whereabouts of a fictional, globe-hopping character named Georgeo Jones. Over a 10-week period ending in March, students solved one riddle per week and then mailed in a list of answers.

A sample: “Georgeo stands on top of a hill and looks out over more than a million people making the yearly hajj, or pilgrimage, to the holiest city of Islam. In the heart of the city stands the Great Mosque, which is the center of worship for Muslims. What country is Georgeo visiting?” (The answer: Saudi Arabia.)

A few weeks after entering, Carpenter heard that his class was among three winning fifth-grade classes and the only California school to win overall.

Reflecting on the 10-week entry process, 11-year-old Tim Hart said: “We were fighting all the time. ‘I have the answer! No, I have the answer!’ But we figured it out.”

Carpenter said he allowed the class to arrive at its own consensus, advising students only on how they might verify their answers in reference materials. That approach enabled them to take full credit for the win.

“It was such an ego boost,” the teacher said. “We kind of forgot about it for a while, and when the word came, they were like, ‘Oh, yeah!’ They’re the kings of geography now . . . at least until next year.”