Welcome, one and all, to my EDCI 336 Free Inquiry Project. What is my inquiry? My inquiry is: Can I learn all 197 flags and, by default, the countries of the world? Not only can I name them, but can I do it in 18 minutes or less?
Actual Learning:
While learning all the countries/flags of the world is cool, this project is really about how we learn things. Can I use standard memorization and repetition to learn a whole bunch of information? If I can then great I’ll talk about what was easy and what was more of a struggle. If I cannot complete my goal, I can reflect on failure and what that actually means.
The How:
So, how is this going to work? Every week, I am going to dedicate time to learning all of the flags/countries for a specific continent. Starting first with Africa, then Oceania, Asia, South America, Europe and ending with North America. To memorize, I will be using a combination of
mnemonic devices, YouTube videos, and lots and lots of repetition at least to start. If it becomes clear that it is not working, I’ll switch it up. I will consider a continent learned if I can name its flags/countries 3 times in a row (as per my old piano teacher)
I will document this learning through screenshots, time-lapse videos, and weekly written reflections. In these written reflections, I will tell you about the highs, lows, and everything in between. I will also include a link to a document separate from the blog that will tell you a fun fact about each of the countries I learned about that week. I will be using the website Sporcle.
You can see my planning document and progress tracker here: Free Inquiry Document
The Why:
I am doing this mostly for fun, but also to expand my general knowledge base. My main inspiration for this comes from a YouTube video I saw about a guy named Jack trying to learn all 197 countries of the world.
I found this to be highly entertaining and watched his journey all the way through. I then saw he had another series about doing the same things, just with the flags, which I also watched. I attempted to do this myself but lost motivation quite quickly so I figure by tying it to a class I’ll keep my motivation and accomplish something I have wanted to do for a long time.
Establishing a Baseline:
Before I actually get started on this for real, I want to establish a baseline and see how much I actually remember from my attempts:
So… my baseline is 58%. That is a whole lot better than I expected, but a big portion of what I got is the most well-known flags in Western society. One thing that I noticed while doing this baseline test is that my spelling is horrendous, so spelling may be an issue that I need to correct. Thank you for reading what I guess is Week One or maybe this Week Zero. Regardless, I hope you enjoyed reading about my inquiry project, and I encourage you to try the quiz for yourselves.