Which projection is it?

Robinson, which is what a school atlas uses. It is a compromise: no flat map of a round world can keep every shape, area and distance right at once, and Robinson gets all three close enough that the continents look like themselves.

Is Australia a continent, or Oceania?

The board says Oceania, which is the usual name for the continent when it is taken to include New Zealand and the Pacific islands as well as Australia. Plenty of schemes say Australia and mean the same thing.

Why does the Pacific appear twice?

Because a flat map has to cut the world open somewhere, and this one is cut at the antimeridian, which runs down the middle of the Pacific. Both edges of the map are the same ocean.

World Map

Geography · Year 1–Year 6

Name the seven continents and the five oceans.

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About the world map

Two boards on the same map. Tap the seven continents to name them, or switch to the oceans and name the five. Show all the labels for the version that is not a quiz, or leave them off and let the class do the naming.

The outlines are real. They are projected from Natural Earth's public domain map data, in the Robinson projection an atlas uses, because this tool asks a class to recognise shapes and a wrong shape teaches the wrong thing. Draw the world with the longitude straight across instead and Antarctica comes out as a bar along the bottom of the board and Greenland as big as Africa.

Europe and Asia are split down the Urals at sixty degrees east, which is the line an atlas draws. The map data files the whole of Russia under Europe, so grouped as it comes Europe would be coloured all the way to the Pacific and Asia would lose its northern third.

The oceans are labels rather than areas, because that is what they are: where the Atlantic stops being the Atlantic and starts being the Southern Ocean is an agreement between people, not a coastline.

The Pacific runs off both edges of the map, which is worth a minute of anybody's lesson: the map is a sphere cut open at one line, and the line happens to fall down the middle of the biggest ocean there is.

How to use it on your whiteboard

1Pick a board: continents or oceans.
2Tap a continent or an ocean to name it.
3The line under the map says something about whichever one you tapped.
4Press Show all to put every name on at once, and Hide to take them all off.
5Use Next to work round them in order.

Questions

Which projection is it?: Robinson, which is what a school atlas uses. It is a compromise: no flat map of a round world can keep every shape, area and distance right at once, and Robinson gets all three close enough that the continents look like themselves.
Is Australia a continent, or Oceania?: The board says Oceania, which is the usual name for the continent when it is taken to include New Zealand and the Pacific islands as well as Australia. Plenty of schemes say Australia and mean the same thing.
Why does the Pacific appear twice?: Because a flat map has to cut the world open somewhere, and this one is cut at the antimeridian, which runs down the middle of the Pacific. Both edges of the map are the same ocean.