Geography education in the United States is in crisis. High school seniors’ scores on the geography portion of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) showed no improvement between 2001 and 2010, and scores have declined from 1994 levels. One solution, we think, is to move student engagement with geography away from the stodgy recitation of places and geographic facts to the doing of mapping and geographic analysis via real world projects and digital tools. Toward that end, for the past few months we’ve been organizing a community of technologists, educators and mappers to build GeoBadges.org. GeoBadges.org aims to be a free and open educational resource where teachers and students can find and work on engaging and useful mapping projects that are aligned to the learning standards they are accountable for in the classroom. Completing projects, such as OpenStreetMap Editing, will result in the earning of badges modeled on the Mozilla Foundation’s open badges infrastructure. This session will introduce the GeoBadges concept and our progress to date, and invite attendees to get involved in the project’s growth as content creators, editors or ambassadors to classrooms around the country.