COUNTRIES

This is a game which can be used to test your knowledge of the capital cities or the national flags of all of the countries in the world. Used appropriately, it could also be used as a teaching aid.

The data source for the game is information obtained from the CIA World Factbook.

This is the introduction screen:

You can select which group of countries you want to be tested on from the “Options” menu seen here:

The countries can be selected by region, sub-region, or countries larger than a specified population. This last option is useful for excluding extremely tiny places.

There are 5 different games accessible from the “Select a Game” menu as shown below:

In all cases, the player is presented with multiple choice solutions. Incorrect answers are highlighted in red, and the game only proceeds when the correct answer is selected. A running score is displayed at the bottom of the screen.

For the “What is the capital of this country?” game, the country is identified in the question box, the flag of that country is displayed, and 9 possible capitals to choose from are listed:

When a correct answer is made, it is acknowledged, and the map of that country is displayed, and after a short pause, the game moves to the next country. Only countries which have not had their capitals identified yet appear in the multiple choice selection options. The flag and the map are sort of irrelevant to this game but give it a bit more “color”.

In the “This is the capital of what country?” game, the capital is identified in the question box and the map of the country is displayed, along with 9 possible answer countries.

With the “Which of these flags belongs to this country?” game, the country is identified in the question box, 9 possible option flags are displayed and the map of the country is displayed.

In the “This is the flag of what country?” game, the flag and 9 option countries are listed:

The last game, “This is the map of what country?” is a little bit different, for each new country, the map slowly gets bigger and bigger until the player correctly identifies the country from the 9 possible options.

Finally, there is an opportunity to look up capital, flag, map or currency information on any or all countries using the “Review” menu option:

Program Notes:

The game was written by me in Visual Basic 6.

Click here to download the program and the data files, unzip all into the same directory and run countries.exe

If you like it and can be bothered, send me an E-Mail. If enough people were interested, I might update the data with the absolute latest information from the Factbook.

Bill Turnbull

Jakarta, Indonesia

August 2006

bill@roziturnbull.com