Think you know Toronto? The city just got its own version of
Click That 'Hood, an online database of games that challenge users to identify city neighbourhoods in rapid succession. You can play two ways: name 20 Toronto neighbourhoods or try to identify all
140. That's right: 140! We admit we didn't know there were that many either.
The game uses open source code created by
Code For America and pulls data from the
City of Toronto Open Data Team, Google maps, and TerraMetrics. We spoke with Matt Keoshkerian, the local developer who contributed to the Toronto version of Click that Hood. He's currently living in Seattle where he works for Google Maps.
What inspired you to contribute to the Toronto neighbourhoods game?
A friend of mine told me about the Seattle version and I had fun playing it. I noticed that my hometown wasn't represented and wanted to rectify that. I noticed it was super easy to add the city myself (the project owners had a great set of instructions), so I decided to just do it.
It took very little searching to find the City of Toronto's official neighbourhoods shapefile (a file that contains the neighbourhood polygons) and re-purpose it for the Click that Hood.
I was actually quite delighted that Toronto has an open data team and that this data was so easy to find. I think it's incredibly awesome that the city government makes public data like this easily accessible to anyone and it's a great example of government working for the good of its citizens.
Why do you think these games are important to Toronto residents?
I think these sorts of games have a lot of inherent educational value. For adults, it's probably more a game that you can point to and say "ha, I know city x better than you!", but for younger children, I believe it helps to develop spatial awareness and coordination, which is necessary for map literacy. As someone who may have a mild case of map obsession (sometimes I browse world or local maps when I'm bored), I think map literacy is really important. Though whether one is born with or taught map literacy is probably up for debate.
Did anything surprise you about Toronto's neighbourhoods?
I never realized how many there are! There are 140 neighbourhoods in the city. That's insane! Part of the process for submitting a new city to the codebase was to play through and make sure every neighbourhood was clickable and, as much as I hate to admit this, it turns out I know very little of the city. It took me about an hour to complete the game in hard mode.
What else can you tell us about Click That Hood?
The project is part of the Code for America program, which is an effort to help governments work better for its citizens. It's hosted on
Github, which among other things is an excellent tool for managing open source projects, allowing others to 'fork' the project and make their own changes, and contribute improvements back to the main code repository. It's a great tool for developers, both new and experienced, and it made it incredibly easy for me to contribute to the project.
Indeed! I moved out here for work with Amazon, but now I work for Google on Google Maps. Though I do want to note that my contribution is independent of my company affiliation.
Learn more about Toronto's neighbourhoods by checking out Yonge Street's neighbourhood profiles.