14 DAY TRIAL // For a high school student, Geography may seem a difficult subject due to the large amount of information that needs to be assimilated. Unlike many, I actually liked studying Geography and the main reason was probably the fact that I found a logical way to memorize the names and locations of all the countries, cities and land features. I believe that visual learning is the most effective of all the studying methods thanks to the better understanding level it provides.
GeoAze, presented by the developers at Silverlight as a novel and fun game, is actually a very useful educational tool for people who want to learn the basics of World Geography. It will help you correctly identify the location of various types of landmarks on the entire globe.
The Looks
GeoAze offers an easy to use and intuitive interface suitable both for children and adults. The main window of the application lets you select the type of game that you want to play, customize the player information and choose the geographical region for the test. There's nothing fancy about it, all the options are presented as drop-down boxes making it easy for all the users to focus on the functionality of the program.
The next window is the actual game window, displaying a map of the region you have previously selected with several objectives emphasized; these are the locations that you have to guess and place the geographical features correctly. The small window floating over the map window shows the current game status, the player's name, information about the game in progress, your partial score and the current location that you have to find.
The Works
GeoAze acts both as a fun, challenging Geography game and as a learning helper, giving you the possibility to study the complete map before taking a test. The New Game window allows you to customize all the details of your game. First, you have to select the game difficulty, letting you choose one of the following: Easy, Middle, Hard and Expert; the last two levels are only available in the Pro version; therefore, you won't be able to test them in the unregistered version.
In the next step of your game configuration process, you can select the region that you wish to learn about. The default region list includes all the continents and several important countries, like Canada, France, Germany and others. For each of the available regions, there is a different set of land features that you can locate. To give you some examples, for Africa, you can have a test locating countries, cities, rivers, or the more general 'Land features', 'Water features' and 'Border features' .
You can select a specific number of questions for all the games you play or check the 'use Maximum' option, which lets you answer all the questions assigned to your category. If you choose a number of questions smaller than the total questions available in that category, you will still have all the features of that type highlighted on the map.
After creating a new player or selecting your player, you are ready to start the game. You don't have a time limit for locating the features displayed on the map, so you can take your time identifying the specified landmark.
If you think that you're not sufficiently well prepared for the current test, you can press the Study Map button in the left toolbar of the map window. Now, the map displays all the geographical features in your selected game giving you the chance to memorize them correctly. This window also enables you to view the game statistics for your player, listing the items that you had problems in locating; this is especially useful because it tells you what your most frequent mistakes are, so that you can focus your learning process on them.
An interesting feature included in the Pro version of GeoAze is the Level Editor. Although by default the application provides a limited set of questions, you are given the opportunity to create custom tests by selecting items from the complete list of landmarks. Unfortunately, you are limited to the maps and locations provided by the developers, restricting the customization process to only a few possibilities.
The Good
GeoAze transforms learning Geography into a fun, stimulating game which makes young people react positively and try to achieve better results with each test they take.
The Bad
Even though the interface of GeoAze is well designed, it seems that the developers at Silverlight neglected the icon of the application. Therefore, GeoAze displays the classical 'Application' icon when installed on Leopard.
The Truth
GeoAze provides high-quality, accurate satellite maps that represent a great addition to the usual Geography educational tools. You can test the application yourself for free and decide after the five runs included in the trial if GeoAze is the appropriate educational tool for your needs.
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
