Wiki Spy: A Wikipedia I Spy, and What to Do With It in Class

Every now and then, as is common on the Internet, you run into a webpage that is both delightful and charming. I, who like the wandering, whimsical, and creative, relish coming across a site that is lovely and idiosyncratic, the way the internet used to be back in the wilds of the 1990s.

This post is about one of those pages. It is called Wiki Spy and was created by Neal Agarwal. In a labor of what I presume is love, he has categorized and sorted some 43,815 objects from Wikipedia into multiple searchable categories. There are some scraper sites that are taking advantage of this wonderful site to gain unearned traffic, but the real site is neal.fun. On his main page, he also has other tools and interactive games. His main informational page is https://nealagarwal.me

The purpose of his page is to present a set of images from Wikipedia on a white field, either at random or arranged according to your search query. The search function lets you sort the images by almost any factor you desire.

I haven’t seen anything like it on the Internet. Yes, there are image search databases, but as far as I know, none of them are presented as an I Spy page.

Which brings me to the second point of this post, its value for children. This site is a wonderful tool for teachers and parents, both for education and for entertainment.

Looking at the pages, I think they would be great, first of all, for the game I Spy, that is obvious. But they are open-concept as well, a way to interact with children and promote out-of-the-box thinking.

Here is a screenshot of objects with the color red as the prompt. I have listed some educational ideas underneath as a springboard. I think they would go nicely with the genre prompts, adding interest and dimensionality.

Wiki Spy classroom activities

Literacy

• Found poem. Circle three objects, write a poem that uses all of them.
• Three-point story. Eyes closed, point three times. Those are your character, your setting, and the object that causes the trouble.
• Riddles. Write a riddle whose answer is somewhere on the sheet. Trade sheets and solve.
• Couplet practice. The original I Spy books paired photographs with rhyming couplets. Have students write their own couplets for the page in front of them.
• Barrier game. Two students, identical sheets, a folder between them. One describes an object until the other can point to it, the point being to make it difficult to guess.
• Alphabet hunt. One object per letter. Harder than it sounds around Q and X.
• Word origins and novel learning. Pick an unfamiliar object, trace where its name came from, and write three new facts.
• Memory. A memory game in which students have 60 seconds to memorize objects on the page before the page is hidden.

Art

• How many reds? An exploration of color.
• Collage. Cut out the images to create a collage.

Science

• Venn diagrams and classification.
• Exploration of the different aspect of science and math concepts.