Teaching with PyWorldAtlas

A free, offline geography toolkit for the classroom. Every student gets the same answers from the same sourced data, quizzes repeat exactly when you reuse a seed, and nothing needs an account or an internet connection once installed.

A lesson in 15 minutes

Minutes	Activity
0 to 3	Everyone opens the Playground and types their own country or town into Look up anything.
3 to 8	Run the class quiz below and answer together. Every screen shows the same questions in the same order.
8 to 12	Press Open in the editor on any card, change one word (a country, a city, a date), and run it again. That is programming.
12 to 15	Talk about one surprise: why is the day so short in Oslo in December? (See Sun and seasons.)

One quiz for the whole class

A seed is a word or number that picks the questions. The same seed always gives the same quiz, so you can print an answer key in advance and every student sees exactly what you see.

>>> from pyworldatlas import Atlas
>>> with Atlas() as atlas:
...     questions = atlas.quiz(topic="capitals", count=3, seed="class-7b", continent="Europe")
>>> for number, question in enumerate(questions, 1):
...     print(f"{number}. {question.prompt}")
...     for letter, choice in zip("ABCD", question.choices):
...         print(f"   {letter}) {choice}")
1. What is the capital of Romania?
   A) Tórshavn
   B) Ljubljana
   C) Bern
   D) Bucharest
2. What is the capital of Hungary?
   A) Saint Peter Port
   B) Copenhagen
   C) Budapest
   D) Monaco
3. What is the capital of Belgium?
   A) London
   B) Brussels
   C) Vienna
   D) Warsaw
>>> print("Answers:", ", ".join(f"{n}{'ABCD'[q.answer_number - 1]}" for n, q in enumerate(questions, 1)))
Answers: 1D, 2C, 3B

Change seed to make a new quiz, and topic to change the subject: learning_topics() lists them all, from capitals and flags to rivers, climate, plug types, and driving sides. Narrow a quiz to one continent or region with continent or region.

More activities

Which is higher? quiz() asks about famous mountains, islands, and lakes: “Which is higher: Mont Blanc or Denali?” (Learning activities).
Why seasons happen. Compare the length of the same day in Oslo and Cape Town, then in June (Sun and seasons).
Dig through the Earth. Find what is on the other side of the planet from your town, and notice how often it is ocean (Learning activities).
How has the world changed? Follow electricity, internet use, or life expectancy since 1960 in one line (The world in numbers).
Travel basics. Which plug would you pack for Japan? Which side of the road do people drive on in Kenya? (Country reference facts).
Explore the terrain. Turn a 3D map of a country and find its highest mountain (Interactive 3D maps).

Classrooms without internet

Install PyWorldAtlas once, then everything runs offline. To give a whole room the optional packs without downloading them on every computer, download a .pack file once, copy it on a USB stick, and install it on each computer:

pyworldatlas add pyworldatlas-statistics.pack

PyWorldAtlas is built for low-cost computers: everything, including the largest place pack, fits in the 512 MB of memory of a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W.

What you can rely on

Every fact comes from a named public source with its date (Data sources and freshness); missing values are left missing, never guessed.
Country names and codes follow published international standards, and the package takes no position on disputes (Educational purpose and editorial policy).
The documentation, maps, and playground are built to be used with a keyboard and screen reader; each 3D map includes a plain-language description.