Catchment

Place schools. Reach kids.

Kids per street, in hundreds

Kids reached

How to play

Kids live along the streets. Open schools at the corners to reach as many kids as you can.

Kids. Each dot is the kids on one street, in hundreds. A 4 is about 400 kids.
School. Opens on a corner and reaches the 3 streets that meet there.
Magnet. Put it on a school. Kids come from one corner further: 6 more streets.
Safe Passage. Kids walk through this corner for free, so a school's reach carries on through it. It also gets kids past roadwork.
Roadwork. No one walks through, and no school can open here.
Closed. A real school that closed in 2013. Kids can walk past, but nothing new opens here.
Expressways and rivers. A red bar means there's no bridge or overpass nearby, so kids on that street can't walk to that corner.
Parks. Kids cut through big parks for free, so a school's reach carries on through a park corner.
Safe Passage routes. Real CPS routes with adults posted along them. Kids walk through these corners for free.
L stations. Kids can ride the L one stop, then walk as usual. A school at a station also reaches the streets around the next stop each way.

Kids reached by two schools only count once. You get 3 checks. Each tells you how close you are to the best possible district. Reach 100% to win.

A new board every day, cut from a real Chicago neighborhood. Kid counts come from the 2020 Census: children aged 5 to 14, spread onto a grid of streets about half a mile long. Catchment is part of The Student Shuffle, a game about where cities put their schools, first shown at the Chicago Architecture Biennial.

Data: U.S. Census Bureau; Chicago Public Schools and CTA via the City of Chicago Data Portal; Chicago Park District; expressways and bridges © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL).

of the best district

In real life

School names

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Checks needed to find the best district

Stats count each day's board, played on that day, in this browser.