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 mor...

 Objective in the "Real Life" Game

The game heavily relies on the "carrot on a stick" principle. All objectives appear to be increasingly possible, yet every goal point disappears moments before you achieve it. There also appears to be no reward for honesty, hard work, altruism, or loyalty.

 The Next Objective of Science

If the question were, “What ought to be the next objective in science?” my answer would be the teaching of science to the young, so that when the whole population grew up there would be a far more general background of common sense, based on a knowledge of the real meaning of the scientific method of discovering truth.

 Taxonomies are Not Arbitrary, but Factual

Mayr lived exactly 100 years, producing a stream of books and papers up to the day of his death. Among these was his 1963 classic, Animal Species and Evolution, the very book that made me want to study evolution. In it Mayr recounted a striking fact. When he totaled up the names that the natives of New Guinea’s Arfak Mountains applied to local birds, he found that they recognized 136 different types. Western zoologists, using traditional methods of taxonomy, recognized 137 species. In other...