MapMaker Interactive–one of the free mapping tools on the National Geographic Education website–lets you explore a world of thematic maps, find your latitude and longitude, customize maps with drawing tools and labels, and more. But how can you get beyond the basic functionality of the mapping tool and start to perform some simple but revealing map analysis? 

To Illustrate MapMaker’s analysis potential, I’ll use today’s post to explore population density and electricity availability and use, starting in Australia and ending in sub-Saharan Africa. (In a follow-up post, I’ll take a look at the same data layers in Asia). Of course, this is just one example of an infinite number of activities that you can perform with MapMaker, and I list some suggestions at the end of this post. (If you have not yet experimented with the basic functionality of MapMaker, please take a minute to watch the short tutorial, which you can find by clicking on the question mark (?) in the top right-hand corner of the main screen).