AR and PokemonGo
categories: AR, Digital literacy, educational technology, gamification, gaming, instructional technology
GOTTACATCHEMALL:EXPLORING POKEMON GO IN SEARCH OF LEARNING ENHANCEMENT OBJECTS
Annamaria Cacchione, Emma Procter-Legg and Sobah Abbas Petersen
Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Facultad de Filologia, Av.da Complutense sn, 28040 Madrid, Spain Independent; Abingdon, Oxon, UK SINTEF Technology and Society, Trondheim, Norway
KEYWORDS
Pokemon Go, MALL, Learning, Augmented Reality, Gamification, Situated learning
ABSTRACT
The Augmented Reality Game, Pokemon Go, took the world by storm in the summer of 2016. City landscapes were decorated with amusing, colourful objects called Pokemon, and the holiday activities were enhanced by catching these wonderful creatures. In light of this, it is inevitable for mobile language learning researchers to reflect on the impact oft his game on learning and how it may be leveraged to enhance the design of mobile and ubiquitous technologies for mobile and situated language learning. This paper analyses the game Pokemon Go and the players’ experiences accordingto a framework developed for evaluating mobile language learning and discusses how Pokemon Go can help to meetsome of the challenges faced by earlier research activities.
A comparison between PG and Geocashing will illustrate the evolution of the concept of location-based games a concept that is very close to that of situated learning that we have explored in several previous works.
Pokémon Go is a free, location-based augmented reality game developed for mobile devices. Players useGPS on their mobile device to locate, capture, battle, and train virtual creatures (a.k.a. Pokémon), whichappear on screen overlaying the image seen through the device’s camera. This makes it seem like thePokemon are in the same real-world location as the player
“Put simply, augmented reality is a technology that overlays computer generated visuals over the real worldthrough a device camera bringing your surroundings to life and interacting with sensors such as location and heart rate to provide additional information” (Ramirez, 2014).
Apply the evaluation framework developed in 2015 for mobile learning applications(Cacchione, Procter-Legg, Petersen, & Winter, 2015). The framework is composed of a set offactors of different nature neuroscientific, technological, organisational and pedagogical and aim to provide a comprehensive account of what plays a major role in ensuring effective learning via mobile devices