What three major seas does Turkey border?

If I had asked that question when I was a child, my parents would have pointed to the globe that sat in our living room or they would have told me to walk down the street to visit the Sangerville Library to look at an Encyclopedia Britannica set (we didn’t have one). As a kid, I loved learning about where countries, oceans and rivers were; what different cultures were like; what languages were spoken there; and so forth. My father was a World War II Navy veteran, and he regularly looked at Life magazine or Time-Life Books, which introduced me to places he traveled during the war.

Phillip Potenziano, superintendent of the Brunswick School Department.

Because we now live in a global world, geography is more important than ever. What happens on the other side of the world affects us here. Economies, environments and agricultures in other places impact what we grow and buy and eat. It also puts our students in a position to learn about and maybe someday solve world problems.

In a recent editorial in Forbes magazine, education writer Vicky Phillips wrote, “Geography … gives young people the insight to draw connections, measure how individual actions can change the world, assess the costs and benefits, and seek solutions to the many complex questions about our planet.”

And in a column on pbs.org, seventh-grade social studies teacher Chris Heffernan says, “Geography matters more now than ever because students need to know human geography… . They need to see not just the differences in cultures, but the similarities. Geography matters today more than ever because our students are growing up in a globalized world. Geography matters now more than ever because of global crises that range from migration to climate change to pandemics.”

I’m always excited about things that inspire and empower young people because I know they really do have the ability to improve our world for humans, animals and the environment. That’s why I’m admittedly geeky about games that make geography fun. My son recently introduced me to GeoGuessr (geoguessr.com), a web-based geography discovery game where players are put somewhere in the world (a Google Street view location) and then must find geographic clues to figure out where they are. There’s a free version as well as a paid version. You can even play with friends.

Websites like world-geography-games.com offer quizzes for first through eighth graders, and ducksters.com has mapping games, crossword puzzles, word searches and more for the same age group. You can also get an appropriate-for-all-ages geography quiz trivia app from the Apple app store.

The next time your family flies on a plane with a screen on the seat in front of you, check out the flight info option. It shows you the departure and arrival cities, the length and duration of the trip, and exactly where the plane is in real time.

I’m still a fan of the good old-fashioned “license plate game” – identify the state license plates on cars around you and whoever names the capital of the state on the plate first gets a point. And, when I was a kid, whoever got the most points got the front seat!

There are lots of ways to make geography fun. I challenge you to check some out and tell me you’re not hooked.

And by the way, the three major seas that Turkey borders are: the Black Sea, the Aegean Sea and the Mediterranean.

For the record, there’s also a smaller Sea of Marmara. Did I mention I’m a bit of a geography nerd?