Skip to the content
Peabody TeachFor teachers and grown-ups

United States states wheel

All fifty states on one wheel, for geography warm-ups, state reports, road-trip games and capital practice.

Tap, flick or press Space

50 entries

Hide a note behind a slice with a bar: cat | a small furry pet. It shows after the spin. Start a line with an emoji to draw it big. Two columns pasted from a spreadsheet work too.

After a spin

Anyone can come up again. Repeats are fine.

Who's away today?

Tap anyone who is away. Their slice is hatched and skipped today only; at midnight they are back. Nobody is deleted.

Drag the wheel round and let go to flick it. Your flick sets the show. The draw is already fair: your browser's secure random generator picks the winner before the wheel moves.

The contents travel inside the link after the # sign, which browsers never send to any server. Anyone you give the link to can read them.

Space spin, or stop sooner · R new round · M sound on or off · F full screen · Esc leave it

Your edits are saved in this browser only, and never sent anywhere. Turns and away marks never go into a link.

How to use it

  1. The wheel already holds 50 entries for “US states wheel”. Edit, add or delete lines in the box and it redraws; your changes stay in this browser.
  2. Tap the wheel, press Space, or drag it and let go to flick it. The winner is drawn first with your browser's secure random generator; the pegs, the clicks and the big reveal only show it.
  3. Choose Fade the winner or Remove the winner to use every entry once, or Keep everyone in for repeats. “Original list” brings back the starting entries, and Print makes a paper spinner of the list.

Ideas for class

  • Assign state reports at random: each student spins once and takes that state, with the winner removed so nobody repeats.
  • Practice capitals: spin a state and the class names its capital, or points to it on a map.
  • Play a postal abbreviation round: students write the two-letter code on their whiteboards and hold it up.
  • Plan an imaginary road trip: three spins give three stops, and the class works out which direction to travel between them.
  • Choose a setting for a story or a pen-pal project, and have students find one thing the state is known for.

Related

Questions

Are all fifty states included?

Yes, exactly fifty, each once. Washington, D.C. and territories are not on the wheel; add them as extra lines if you want them.

The wheel is crowded. Can I use fewer states?

Yes. Delete the states you do not need, for example keeping one region. The wheel redraws with bigger slices and bigger text.

Does each state have the same chance?

Yes. Alaska is just as likely as Rhode Island, whatever its size on the map or its number of people. Each state has exactly one slice of the same size.

Nothing you do here is sent to us. Names, lists and settings stay in this browser. No sign-in, no ads.