Geography Zone

Oct, 2005

GeographyZone is an international, edutainment website which centers around a geography quiz. It has received attention from the BBC, CNN and more than 2 million participants.

The geography quiz application was developed in Flash. Steps were taken to prevent cheating which involved the creation of a communication protocol between Flash and the server. To date, no known complains of cheating have been lodged.

The entire site was custom-built. Features include a real-time leaderboard, membership and groups. Performance and security were prioritized as traffic was high, with over 2 million pariticipants. As such, MySQL and PHP optimization was key to this site.

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Landing page: introduces new users to the idea, provides a one-step log-in system, as well as access to the store The Game: developed in Flash, it included a variety of different types of quizzes. Cheating was prevented with the use of a special communication and tracking protocol International Leaderboard: the leaderboard featured sorting, with the use of unobtrusive Javascript. Users could also view leaderboards for different challenges. A separate leaderboard for US states was also available Membership: registered users could track their progress within the various quizzes and join groups to compete against other groups. Security measures were adopted to ensure that accounts weren't stolen