European Tripoints
Rolf Palmberg
Age Range: 11 and over
Imagine that you have completed a course focusing on Europe or, more specifically, its countries and their location in relation to each other. The lesson outlined below offers a motivating way to end the course.Here is what to do.
Hand out some atlases and detailed maps of Europe to your students and invite them to work in pairs. Tell them that the places where the borders of three neighbouring countries meet are called tripoints (or trinational borders or trifinia).
Ask them to identify as many European tripoints as possible, and at the same time to decide whether the tripoints are wet (located in rivers or lakes) or dry (located on land). If you want to use computers instead of maps and atlases, ‘Google Earth’ is a useful tool for the present purpose.
After some time, rearrange the students into groups of four or five and ask them to share and compare their findings. Did anyone find all the forty-eight tripoints?
Next, challenge the students to put their knowledge of European tripoints to the test. This can be done using ‘Tripoint Guru 2008’, a computer program that is freely downloadable from the website ‘European Tripointing’ at http://www.vasa.abo.fi/users/rpalmber/borders3.htm.
The website also offers general information on European tripoints and shows photographs of 35 European tripoints and/or tripoint areas. Most of the tripoints are marked with monuments of various kinds instead of traditional border markers, some of them more beautiful than others.
Which is your favourite tripoint monument?
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