put students in the enviable position of reconsidering assumptions At one level, getting students to draw a map is a nice basic way of instilling some basic old fashioned geographical knowledge. If you just want a 5-minute time filler or palate cleanser between other tutorial activities, handing out an outline map of the UK and calling out names of rivers, mountains, cities etc takes some beating! You can always warn the students a week in advance and give them the "homework" of preparing for a map game on the cities of Europe, the rivers that drain into the Arctic Ocean or the locations mentioned by Wilfred Thesiger in Arabian Sands.

At another level, the map quiz opens up all sorts of possibilities to put students in the enviable position of having to reconsider their assumptions about Geography. Here are some examples.

"Draw me a map of the Arctic"

I announce this without warning in an early tutorial. "You have 4 minutes". It sounds simple at first, but then they get their pencils out and into their head pops the good old Mercator projection, which suddenly makes it really difficult to know where to begin a map of the Arctic. So I give them a helpful hint: "start with the north pole in the middle of your page". The first time I did this I was really surprised at how difficult and novel the students found it. Part of their problem was that they didn't have a very clear picture of exactly what "the Arctic" involves, but the larger part of their problem was imagining the world from a different angle. Again, I'm there with the helpful hint in the form of a globe taken off its mount so it resembles a bowling ball. I hold it up first "upright" with the north pole at the top (which doesn't help them), and then I turn it so that the north pole points right at them and they are looking "down" onto the Arctic. "Draw it from that angle." If you want, there's an opportunity here for a discussion about map projections, and how come Mercator's Arctic looks so different from the Arctic on a globe or a north-polar projection. Get them to consider the relative sizes of Greenland and the UK on the two projections if you want the tutorial to go that way. Or, more interestingly, try:

"Now draw me a map of the Equator"

This is actually quite tricky, and it goes differently depending on whether you do it in the same session that they just did the Arctic or do it at some other point when the Arctic map isn't in their minds. If you do it immediately after a discussion about the difference between "the Arctic" and "the Arctic Circle" students are likely to face some anxious internal deliberation about whether the Equator is an area or a line. Hopefully some bright spark will quickly draw a horizontal line across their page and hold it up. The others hold their breath and look at the tutor in anticipation....

At this point you have many options. You could play the "but is that a map?" gambit, devil's advocating that a line on a piece of paper isn't a map, and allowing them to argue you into a corner. Alternatively, if you think the group as a whole can see that the line is indeed a map of the equator you could go down the traditional route of "OK - now add some detail and don't forget a scale and a north point". Or, if you want to fly straight into deeper waters at this point you could try the next one:

"Draw me a map of Home"

I'm not even going to start working through your options on this one. You're on your own. Good luck. If you want some inspiration, Check out my Monument Valley tutorial (link coming soon!), which ties directly into this.