# How to Make a Geography Quiz or Classroom Map

Build a blank or partially labelled map for a geography quiz or handout: paint the countries you're asking about, control exactly which names show, and export a print-ready file.

> Editor: https://ohmymaps.com/ · Versão em página: https://ohmymaps.com/blog/geography-quiz-classroom-map/

A geography quiz needs the opposite of a normal reference map: instead of
labelling everything so the reader recognises the world at a glance, you
want to label almost nothing, so the reader has to know it. [Oh My
Maps!](https://ohmymaps.com/) is a reasonable tool for either job, because
labels are entirely under your control, country by country.

![A quiz-style world map with only a handful of countries painted and named, the rest left blank at the default fill colour](/blog/posts/geography-quiz-map.svg)

## Decide what you are testing

Two common formats, and the editor supports both without any special mode:

- **"Name the highlighted countries."** Paint a handful of countries in one
  colour, leave the rest at the default fill, and turn labels off entirely.
  The map is the question; an answer key is a second export with labels on.
- **"Match the shaded regions to a legend."** Paint several countries in
  different colours, add a legend explaining what each colour means, and let
  students work out which is which from context rather than a printed name.

Either way, start from a blank map: open the editor and nothing is painted
yet.

## Highlight, without labelling

Pick a colour, click the countries you are asking about, done. If you are
building a set (Europe's capitals, South America, wherever), the **Groups**
control applies a whole continent in one click, which is faster than
building a country list by hand when your quiz is regional rather than a
scattered set. More on groups in
[how to colour country groups and alliances](/blog/map-country-groups-and-alliances/).

<div class="cta">
  <p><strong>Build the question map first.</strong> Paint the countries you're asking about, no labels, and export.</p>
  <a class="cta-button" href="https://ohmymaps.com/">Open the editor</a>
</div>

## Build the answer key from the same map

Turn on **Country names**, search for exactly the countries in play, and
label only those, leaving the rest of the world unlabelled. Because this is
the same underlying map, painted colours and positions match the question
sheet exactly, and exporting the answer key is one more click rather than a
second document built from scratch.

## When a map is too crowded to label cleanly

If a quiz set clusters a lot of small, adjacent countries, the automatic
label placement can run out of room to fit every name legibly (the
mechanics are in
[how Oh My Maps! places country labels automatically](/blog/automatic-country-label-placement/)).
When that happens, the whole set switches to a numbered key panel instead:
each country gets a number on the map, and a legend on the side lists the
names. For a quiz specifically, this is often the better format anyway,
since it forces the student to match a number to a name rather than reading
a nearby label.

## Keeping it printable

A few settings matter more for a handout than for a screen map:

- **Patterns** (diagonal hatching, dots) keep painted regions distinguishable
  when the sheet is photocopied in black and white, which most classroom
  handouts eventually are. Detail in
  [how to make a colour-blind-friendly, print-safe map](/blog/colour-blind-friendly-map-patterns/).
- **Export at 4000 or 8000 px** for a sharp printed page; 8000 if the sheet
  will be printed at full page size or larger.
- **SVG** is worth exporting alongside the raster if you plan to add a title,
  question numbers or instructions in a layout tool afterward, since it
  stays crisp at any size you place it at.

## Title and subtitle for a self-contained handout

**Title** and **Subtitle** bake a heading into the image itself, useful when
the map needs to stand alone on a printed page rather than sitting under a
heading you add separately in a document.

## Next steps

- [The full tour of the editor](/blog/how-to-make-a-custom-world-map-online/)
  covers painting, labels and export end to end.
- [How to colour country groups and alliances](/blog/map-country-groups-and-alliances/)
  for building regional question sets in one click.
- [How to make every country a different colour](/blog/random-colour-map-every-country-different/)
  for a quick reference map with no data behind it at all.