5 EraPin rounds to open your Cold War unit

The first week of a Cold War unit usually opens with a map anyway — spheres of influence, divided Berlin, proxy conflicts. EraPin turns that map work into a five-minute daily game your students play as they walk in.

Each round shows a historical photo and clues. Students deduce where it happened (pin on the map) and when (pick the year) — from geographic anchors, and from what the photo itself shows: the cars, the uniforms, the architecture, the technology. Clues never name the country or city, so the reasoning is the work.

The week, day by day

Run the Cold War pack at 5 rounds per day. Across the week your students will have reasoned their way around the globe — Europe, Asia, the Americas, Africa — and practiced placing events across the full arc of the era, from the late 1940s to 1991. Each round ends with a debrief you can put on the projector: what the event was, where it sits, why there and then. That debrief is a ready-made discussion prompt — "what gave it away?" gets students narrating their own reasoning.

By Friday, the pack's timeline view (Pro) lays the whole era out by decade and region — a quick check on whether the week spanned the era or clustered on Berlin.

Setup, once

Create a class at teach.erapin.com, pick the Cold War pack, set 5 rounds. Students join with a room code on any device, or you project one screen. No student accounts, no emails, no sign-ups. The pack, room codes, and leaderboard are free; auto-publish (each day's rounds post themselves on your class days), reports, timeline, and printable cards are Pro — free for 30 days on every new account, no card.

If your unit needs events we don't have, tell us — several packs exist because a teacher asked.