Map Conversation Cards

Discussion prompts for teaching with maps

In the winter and spring quarters of the last academic year I collaborated with our instructional support specialist student workers to develop and refine teaching tools and activities for use during class visits to the map center.

We came up with the idea of having small cards with prompts on them to give students as entry points for engagement with historical maps.

V1.0 prototyping

Julie van den Hout made our first set of seven cards, laying them out in a Word document.

The “find three x” prompt format was inspired by PhD. candidate Kelly Fu’s effective discussion questions for a class she brought to the map center early in the winter quarter.

We found that the cards worked well to encourage conversation, and students enjoyed the game-like experience.

The cards were most effective when used by one person or a small group analyzing a single map. Because of the wording, they did not work as well for larger groups of students looking at multiple maps.

V1.5 prototyping

Encouraged by these early successes, I worked to expand the first set of prompts and created an additional set intended for scenarios where students would compare more than one map.

I built the lists in Google Sheets and created layouts in Google Docs. In the image below, the single map prompts are gray and the prompts requiring more than one map are blue.

Once printed, I shared them with colleagues in the map center.

V2.0 printed deck of 50

Colleagues gave feedback and contributed additional prompts in the spreadsheet. Through conversations it became clear that a single deck would be preferable, so I worked to standardize the format of the questions.

I created a back for the cards in Canva, centering the design around a compass rose copied from a Lucien Boucher Air France poster, and working with a color pallet based on the original artwork.

When the prompts were finalized, I created Canva layouts for the fronts of the cards, placing one prompt on each. The font I chose is called Lancelot, an elegant, vintage-looking serif font with fancy capital letters. Prompts requiring multiple maps have stars on them to indicate whether two or three maps are needed.

I exported the designs from Canva as individual images and uploaded them into a layout on the Moo Cards website. We placed an order for two decks with rounded corners and gloss on both sides.

The final product is below! We are looking forward to test driving them with classes in the next academic quarter.