All about GeoInquiries
Special thanks to Esri Education for these wonderful resources!
15 minutes
A GeoInquiry is a 15-minute, pre-built activity designed by Esri Education that allows teachers to cover required content using a free, online, interactive map. The activities are standards-based and closely follow the map concepts taught in leading U.S. textbooks.
ArcGIS Online
Editable
Shareable
Because they are published under Creative Commons, they can be loaded to the school or district learning management system such as Edmodo, Blackboard, Portals, or Google Classroom. A flipped classroom setting is perfect for this type of experience. Assign students the GeoInquiry for investigating prior to a class discussion or further investigation.
Student Worksheets
Summer 2019 – The Esri Team has begun creating Google doc versions of student worksheets. You can track progress and download at https://esriurl.com/
All you need is the internet…
Device happy
Built to share
Extensive growing collection

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Let’s go spelunking for cool maps and data!
Click the image above the topics’ list to see full list online. Click the topic name to get the activity. Click Open on the activity page to view and download the PDF document.
If you’re new to GeoInquiries, review the online guide, “Getting to Know GeoInquiries“.
American Literature
- Religious Diversity and the Scarlet Letter
- Virus of Fear: Witches
- Poe and the Red Death
- Chancellorsville and The Red Badge of Courage
- Twain: Travel Blogger
- Hurricane Warning (Issac’s Storm, Their Eyes Were Watching God)
- Our Town, Your Town
- The Great Gatsby
- To Kill a Mockingbird
- Depression, Dust & Steinbeck
- Hiroshima
- Dr. King’s Road to a Birmingham Jail
- Finding Mango Street
- Fahrenheit 451
- Surviving the Wild
AP Environmental Science
- Population dynamics
- Megacities
- Down to the last drop
- Dead zones (water pollution)
- The Beagle’s Path
- Primary productivity
- Tropical Deforestation
- Marine debris
- El Nino (and climate)
- Slowing malaria
- Altered biomes
- Spinning up wind power
- Resource consumption and wealth
- The human journey
- Investigating biodiversity
AP Human Geography
- Distance, transportation, and scale
- Understanding Globalization
- World Population
- USA Demographics
- You claim it, you name it! (Toponyms)
- Language and Religion
- Sacred space – sacred place
- Migration – On the Move
- Borders, boundaries, and barriers
- Farming, vegetation and the rural landscape
- Agricultural Patterns
- The Human Development Index
- Comparing country development
- What’s the range?
- Urban areas and edge cities
Level 2
- Language and Religion – The diffusion of Islam
- Range: Why Hexagons
- Urban Distribution and Density
- Farming, Can you believe it?
- Time or Distance
Earth Science
- Topography and our national heritage
- Remote sensing
- Mining the world’s most used minerals
- Rock types tell stories
- North American landforms
- Cracked plates (tectonics)
- The earth moves under our feet (earthquakes)
- Plate type effect on volcanoes
- Mountain building
- A river runs through it (freshwater)
- Ocean features
- Fluid Earth: winds and currents
- How’s the weather?
- Tropical storms
- Climate change
Level 2
- Cracked Places – Earthquake prone
- Earth moves – Seismic stations
- Mountain Building – volcanoes
- Oceans: Hotspots
- Rivers – Watershed Analysis
Elementary
- Biomes and ecosystems
- Time zones
- Street maps
- Settlement patterns: people and water
- Exploring Elevation with Lewis and Clark
- Discovering map scale
- Where does the water go? (watersheds)
- Climate
- Seismic events: natural hazards
- Mississippi River exploration
- Expansion of the United States
- Public lands and national parks
- Weather forecasting
- Energy production
- Natural resources and regions
Government
Math
- D=RxT
- Rates and Proportions: A Lost Beach
- Linear Growth
- How much rain? LInear Equations
- Rates of population change
- Distance and Midpoint
- The coordinate plane
- Euclidean vs. Non-Euclidean
- Area and Perimeter at the mall
- Measuring Crop Circles
- Areas of Complex Figures
- Similar Triangles
- Perpendicular Bisectors
- Centers of Triangles (triangle circumcenter)
- Volume of pyramids
US History
- The Great Exchange
- The 13 Colonies – 1700s
- The War Before Independence (The American Revolution)
- The War of 1812
- Westward, ho! (Trails west)
- The Underground Railroad
- From Compromise to Conflict
- A nation divided: The Civil War
- Native American Lands
- Steel and the birth of a city (natural resources)
- World War I
- Dust Bowl
- A day that lived in infamy (Pearl Harbor)
- Operation Overlord – D-Day
- Hot spots in the Cold War
Level 2
World Geography
- March of time
- Running hot and cold
- Earth moves
- Life on the edge
- Crossing the line
- Growing pains
- Standards of living
- A line in the sand
- Population and phone lines
- The Arabian peninsula
- Seasonal differences
- Wealth of nations
- Eye on Central America
- Water world
- North American trade
- Level 2
- Cities at Risk
- GDP Per Capita
- Net Migration
- Central American Population
World History
- Cradles of Civilization
- Silk Roads
- Medieval Europe: Invasions
- The Crusades
- Trade and the Black Death
- Russian expansion to the sea
- Early European Exploration
- The Reformation
- The First European Industrial Revolution
- Latin American Independence
- Age of Napoleon
- Africa’s bounty & borders
- Post WWI and the League of Nations
- African Independence
- Cooperation since 1945
Level 2
- Patterns of Civilization
- Black Death Cities
- Africa’s Resources
- African Independence and Coups
- Industry and Population
Hacking GeoInquiries
Click the icon to learn how to edit GeoInquiries to suit your class needs.
Individual Map Layer Links by Collection
Click the icon to explore all the map layers available throughout the GeoInquires collection of activities.
GeoInquiries Gallery
Click the icon to explore the GeoInquiries gallery of activities...ready to use!