I ran this post last spring at the end of the CBS television series The Amazing Race. A new season of the show began last night so I thought it would be appropriate to share the idea again. Of course The Amazing Race conflicts with the new Ken Burns series on PBS so I did a lot of channel flipping last night.

The CBS program The Amazing Race is one of my must-watch Sunday evening television programs. For the last few weeks I have been watching the show and thinking “if I still taught World Geography, I could design a great student project around the show.”

Here is how I envision a World Geography teacher using The Amazing Race and Google Earth to design a student project. Each Monday after a new episode of the show airs, students would do some research on the places the contestants visited in the episode. The students would then add placemarks containing some brief information, perhaps even a video clip, to their Google Earth files. By the end of the show the students will have 15-20 placemarks and have learned a little bit about each place that the show’s contestants visited. The culminating assignment for the students could be to select one place on which to give an “expert presentation” to the class.

If you have tried a project like this with your students, please leave a comment. I would love to hear about it. I did some searching on the web to see if I could find an example of a project like this being done, but I didn’t find anything quite like I have envisioned. The closest example I found was this Google Map from the last season of The Amazing Race.

View Amazing Race 13 in a larger map