Spin the Wheel Countries: Geography Games With All 193 Loaded

Five countries is not a draw

When I first built the European countries wheel and its neighbours, each one shipped with five example countries and a line telling you to paste in the rest. It made sense to me at the time, and it was wrong. Nobody searching for a wheel of European countries wants to go and find a list of European countries first. And a wheel with France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK on it is not a geography tool. It just repeats the five countries everyone names anyway.

So every country wheel now carries the full list: 54 for Africa, 47 for Asia, 43 for Europe, 23 for North America, 12 for South America and 14 for Oceania, 193 in all. When I spun the African countries wheel while writing this, it landed on Mali. I would not have picked Mali, and that is the point.

Why spin rather than let them choose

Ask a class to pick a European country for a project and you get France, Italy and Spain, then a negotiation about who gets France. Ask for an Asian country and it is Japan, China and India. That is not laziness. People pick what they already know, and the rest of the map stays blank.

A full wheel breaks that habit without you having to argue for it. It turns up Moldova, Laos, Benin, Suriname and Tuvalu, places with real histories that nobody would have volunteered for. And because the wheel chose and you did not, "why did I get Moldova?" has an answer nobody can take personally.

The lists, and whose lists they are

Geography lists are never neutral, so it is worth knowing what is on these. They are UN member states, sorted by the UN geoscheme. That puts Turkey, Cyprus, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia on the Asia wheel and Russia on the Europe wheel. It also leaves out observer states such as Vatican City and Palestine, and territories such as Greenland and Puerto Rico. That is why other random country generators say 195 or 197: they add the two observers, and sometimes Kosovo and Taiwan.

Your syllabus may draw those lines differently, and that is fine. Delete or add slices to match it. Just know that the page reloads its original list the next time you open it, which comes up again below.

The Antarctica wheel is the odd one out. No country owns Antarctica, so it holds the seven countries that claim part of it instead. That makes a good lesson on its own.

Five geography games for class

1. The project draw, with no repeats

Switch on Remove after spin before you start. Each country drops off the wheel once it has been drawn, so thirty students get thirty different countries and nobody can trade. Africa, Asia and Europe each have more countries than a class of thirty has students. North America (23), Oceania (14) and South America (12) do not, so for those, reload the page and carry on once the wheel runs out, or start with the continents wheel to share groups out first. Reloading puts every country back.

2. The thirty-second warm-up

Spin once and ask the room for anything they know: the capital, which countries border it, where it is on the map on the wall. With 43 or 54 countries on the wheel, most spins land somewhere the class knows little about. That is useful too, because "nobody knows anything about Eritrea" is a fine way into ten minutes of finding out. When you only want the name, Quick result (skip the spin) drops the animation.

3. Timed "tell me three things"

Spin a student and a country: the student on the classroom spinner, then the country. Switch on Timer after spin and give them a minute to say three true things. The clock starts when the wheel lands, not when you press spin. There is more on why that matters in the spin timer post.

4. Capitals, both directions

The world capitals wheel starts with twenty capitals from around the world, including the three that catch people out: Brasília, Canberra and Ottawa. Spin a capital and ask for the country. It is noticeably harder than the usual way round, and it works well as a second round once the class has warmed up.

5. Narrow it to the unit you are teaching

Teaching the EU, West Africa or Southeast Asia rather than a whole continent? Paste the countries you want into the entry box and press Replace list instead, and the wheel draws only from those. Because the country page reloads its full list each visit, build any list you want to keep on the main wheel and name it in the Wheels tab. Lists saved there stay in your browser.

The two-spin trap

The obvious way to pick a random country from the whole world is two spins: the continents wheel first, then that continent's country wheel. It feels fair, and each spin on its own is fair. Together, they are not fair to the countries.

Each continent gets the same one-in-seven slice, however many countries it holds. So each of South America's 12 countries comes up about 1.2% of the time, and each of Africa's 54 about 0.26%. Over the two spins, Paraguay is four and a half times as likely as Malawi. Europe gets one draw in seven, although it holds 43 of the 193 countries, which is closer to one in four and a half.

Antarctica makes it stranger. A seventh of the draws land there, and its wheel holds the seven claimant countries, so Chile and Argentina, which also sit on the South America wheel, each come up about 3.2% of the time. That is twelve times as often as any one African country.

None of this matters if what you want is "a continent, then a country in it", for example to give each group a different continent. If you want every country in the world to have the same chance, make one draw from one list. A wheel with 193 slices is unreadable, so use the bulk name picker, which is built for long lists and draws with the same secure random generator. Each country page lists its countries below the wheel, so copy the six lists in and draw once.

What these wheels will not do

• They do not show facts about the country. You get the name and nothing else: no flag, capital, population or map pin. The finding out is the lesson, not the tool's job.
• They do not keep your edits. Each country page reloads its full list every visit. That is handy for refilling after a no-repeat draw, and annoying if you trimmed it to the EU. Save trimmed lists on the main wheel.
• Long names are shortened on the slice. On a 54-slice wheel, "Central African Republic" does not fit, so the slice shows the start of it. The winner line under the wheel always shows the full name, so on a projector, read the result from there.
• The lists follow one convention. UN members and the UN geoscheme, as described above. If your curriculum counts differently, edit the wheel to match. The wheel is not the authority on what counts as a country.

What they do guarantee is the draw. Every country on the wheel has the same chance on every spin, picked with the browser's cryptographic random number generator before the wheel starts turning, and you can check that yourself. The rest of the classroom tools are on the teacher page, all free, with no signup and no ads.