Atlas DailyPlay today

A five-minute geography starter

A free geography game for students that fits the first five minutes of a lesson.

Atlas Daily gives everyone the same five places each day. Each place has up to five clues, hardest first, and the class has to work out the answer before finding it on a 3D globe with no names and no borders. It runs in a web browser, needs no accounts and collects nothing personal from pupils.

Open classroom mode

Running it as a starter activity

  1. Put the game on the board. Open atlasdaily.day/?class=1 on the classroom computer. Classroom mode makes the clue text big enough for the back row and adds a Reveal step, so you decide when the class sees the answer. It never touches the streak or stats saved on that computer. On a normal page, zooming the browser to 150% (Ctrl and + on Windows, Cmd and + on a Mac) works too.
  2. Read clue 1 aloud. Give pairs thirty seconds to agree a guess and a reason. The first clue is hard on purpose; the reasoning matters more than the answer.
  3. Pause before Lock in. Place the pin where the class suggests, then stop. Take a vote, or ask for mini-whiteboards up, before anyone commits. You can move or cancel the pin until you choose Lock in.
  4. Ask for the next clue if you need it. Each extra clue makes the place easier and lowers the points available, so the class weighs certainty against score.
  5. Read the recap. After each answer, a short paragraph explains the place. It is a natural lead-in to the rest of the lesson.

One round takes two or three minutes with discussion, so a single place makes a starter and all five fill a plenary or a cover lesson.

How it fits the curriculum

The KS3 programme of study for England asks pupils to “extend their locational knowledge and deepen their spatial awareness of the world’s countries” and to “build on their knowledge of globes, maps and atlases” (national curriculum). Most Atlas Daily rounds are countries, chosen across every inhabited continent, and the globe has no labels, so pupils have to know where a place is rather than recognise a name on a map.

At KS4, the GCSE subject content expects students to “develop and extend their knowledge of locations, places, environments and processes, and of different scales including global” (DfE GCSE geography subject content). The clues lean on physical and human geography, history and culture, which gives you a hook for place-based case studies.

Printable clue sheets

Every finished day has its own page on the past puzzles list. Choose Print clue sheet on a day’s page: the clues print on the first sheet and the answers start on a new page, so you can hand out the clues and keep the answer key. Use one as a homework, a quiz or a starter when the projector is not working.

Age suitability

The clues are written for a general audience and are suitable for pupils aged 11 and over. They are factual and sometimes mention history such as wars, independence struggles, coups and colonial rule. If that matters for your group, read a day’s clues on its answer page before the lesson.

Privacy for schools

The full detail, including the anonymous round results sent from ordinary games, is on the privacy page.

If the game does not load at school

Ask your IT team to allow atlasdaily.day. The game loads everything it needs from that one domain. The globe needs a browser with WebGL 2, which every current version of Chrome, Edge, Safari and Firefox has; if the page says the globe cannot be drawn, hardware acceleration may be switched off in the browser settings.

More for your lessons

Each place that has appeared in a puzzle has its own page with a locator map, its land neighbours and the clues used, for example Belgium. The geography quiz has twelve clue sets on one page, and the free archive lets you replay any of the last 30 days. New to the game yourself? Start with how to play.