Montessorium: Intro to Geo is an iOS geography app for elementary and middle school. Its big collection relies on basic drills and repetition to help learners learn and memorize country names, shapes, locations, and flags. After choosing a continent, learners are presented with a group of countries. The narrator says, “Can you place the countries?” and learners must place each country in its spot on a larger map. A variety of similar activities follow and build on memorization and recall in successively more difficult circumstances. Activities include tapping and dragging countries to their correct location, drawing lines to match countries, names, and flags, and coloring in each country’s flag from memory. When learners complete a whole set, they get a mark on their progress map and move on to a new set. The default is for learners to work with a set of six countries at a time, but educators can change that number in the settings menu.

Teachers can use Montessorium: Intro to Geo to help learners memorize names, shapes, locations, and flags for countries around the world. The app doesn’t offer any supplemental information about the countries beyond what’s introduced in the memorization drills. Teachers will likely want to extend learning with photographs, videos, text, audio, or hands-on activities that explore the culture of different countries. Unfortunately, educators can’t choose which countries learners will see in the app, but the presentation order is always the same, so if educators play ahead of their learners, they can pick some countries to expand upon. If educators have a large world map in the classroom, learners can mark off countries they’ve learned as they progress through the app.

Montessorium: Intro to Geo offers easily accessible drills for learning the names and locations of countries around the world, but with such a large scope, it risks feeling overwhelming. The loosely Montessori-inspired activities are methodically organized around repetition and successively build fluency with information learners have just memorized. This approach feels neat and organized, and does a great job of naming and placing every country. Students can learn which countries border each other and what their relative sizes are, discover island nations, and even experience a tiny bit of culture by viewing the flags. But the drill approach isn’t for everyone, and with hundreds of countries to cover, Montessorium: Intro to Geo feels cumbersome and tedious. A bit of extra cultural information — such as photos, typical food, climate, and so on — about each country could help alleviate that feeling and would be a nice addition. It may also frustrate educators that there’s no way to choose which countries learners learn about, no way to look for a particular country on the map, and no way to go back to review countries that have already been covered. And sometimes the presentation is awkward, such as countries waiting to be placed on the map that are hard to find on the screen. Overall Montessorium: Intro to Geo is a decent choice for a narrow set of learning objectives, and is best used in small doses.

Website: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id1022409608?uo=4&at=10laCG&ct=website

Overall User Consensus About the App

Student Engagement

Students who like geography will enjoy learning about so many different countries. There’s some variety that can help keep them interested, but the activities are repetitive; anything more than small doses feels tedious.

Curriculum and Instruction

Through drag-and-drop repetition, recognition, and multiple-choice questions, learners can learn the names, shapes, locations, and flags of all the countries in the world.

Customer Support

Students easily track progress as they make their way through different countries. The developer’s website offers some extension ideas.