Teaching with Pokemon Go

Learning objectives that ask students to assemble and integrate data (like a language or math class) are well-suited to the capture and find aspects of Pokémon Go!. Imagine setting up a variety of PokéStops around your campus. Each one can be visited by students as they go about gathering the data they need to accomplish the learning objective you set. Perhaps after traveling about campus, they have to return to your classroom and use the data they’ve gathered like PokéBalls to solve more complex problems that measure your students’ critical thinking abilities.

The data they’ve gathered might help provide a benefit/clue/buff to help them. Once they solve this more complex problem, they capture a Pokémon unique to that question. And let students know that the Pokémon they captured is just one of many! The idea of “catching them all” speaks to the full range of knowledge and skills that are normally embedded in most learning objectives.

Once captured, though, Pokémon are like your character in that they have qualities and levels and can be improved over time. Perhaps you could then give your students a series of highly focused challenges of increasing sophistication that, when answered correctly, causes their Pokémon to level up. Each kind of challenge is designed to advance a particular kind of Pokémon and by extension, give your student an opportunity to demonstrate that they have achieved mastery over a particular topic.

Once the student feels ready, they can take their Pokémon to a Pokémon Gym that you set up on campus as a final challenge. The learning Pokémon Gym would obligate students to use the wide range of learning that they have achieved in the lesson you designed to show that they can defeat the Pokémon in the Gym.