Our online version of our World Agricultural Systems (Crops/Soils 360) class at Washington State University includes a unit about the affects of the environment, including climate and soil types, on agricultural systems. When we developed the online version of the class in 1998-99, we needed a means for engaging students in what we thought of as an exciting topic but one that students would likely find tedious if verbal descriptions of climate and soil types were the main introduction to that material. After having students determine the Koopen Climate type for their home town (using a binomial key to the K-G-P climate classifications, and online historic weather data for their region) early in the unit, we come back to it in an integrating exercise several weeks later. For this unit's culminating exercise, they similarly determine climate classification for a South African city using historic weather data, compare it to the classification shown on Goode's World Atlas “World Climatic Regions” map, find two other locations in the world with this climate type and compare both the agricultural systems and soil classifications for these three locations (using the respective GWA thematic maps) in an essay that is graded both for technical merit and quality of discussion. Inevitably about 1/3 of the students (without prompting) use other maps as well (import/export of different commodities, natural vegetation, population, land use, etc.) .