Interesting. One suggestion -- if you're going to use dynamic URLs with query parameters, you should re-evaluate them when the browser back/forward buttons are pressed.
Looks neat, but I don't understand the use case. I thought maybe it was a form of heat map, but then it asked me to determine what definitions were relevant. For instance, the civil war map. Why was it asking me to decide the correct explanation for the civil war? And what did the map represent...countries that had a civil war?