Pokemon Go App has been the hottest thing in the news lately, but what about using Pokemon Go for more than just fun? Have you ever considered the possible educational benefits of Pokemon Go and tried to encourage your kids to play the game for this purpose? It’s quite interesting actually once you start thinking about all the different elements you could include and touch upon with the Pokemon Go App as an object lesson or tool! Honestly you could cover aspects of Health/Fitness/Safety, Science, Geography, Spelling/Vocabulary, Reading, and even Math! Here are a few of these subjects as they relate to the app:
Educational Benefits of Pokemon Go: Geography and Map Reading
In order to truly understand the app, you have to become fully engaged in game play. That means you’ll want to go on walks, bike rides, or even road trips in the car to explore different areas of town and different Geographic locations. This includes keeping an eye out to visit these areas and search for wild Pokemon such as the Pidgey and Spearow that appeared here. You will find them from different land types such as desert, mountains, lakes, oceans, rivers, forest, or city. Having long chats with your child about the different types of land or water you are noticing on your adventures can help build their vocabulary skills and enhance their learning through this hands-on activity.
Educational Benefits of Pokemon Go: Map Skills To Locate Poke Stops
Being able to read the map is important too and covers their practice in Geography. You use your map to follow the roads until you come across a blue square shape on a stick (a 3D Poke Stop icon). This square shape will transform into a circular shape on top and allow you to click on it. You can now spin the image in the middle to earn free items such as extra pokeballs, potions, revives, and even berries. These items are all extremely valuable when it comes to capturing and powering up Pokemon. If you are taking a drive in the car for your adventure with your child, you could have your child play navigator. Ask them to read the map directions to you using the compass or following the roads. They could specifically say, “travel south and turn right here”, or “stop up ahead at the next intersection and park”.
Educational Benefits of Pokemon Go: Addition, Subtraction, and Counting
Kids can practice their addition and subtraction skills when trying to figure out how many Pokemon Candies they need to evolve their Pokemon. For example: It takes 25 Ratatta candies to evolve your Pokemon into a Raticate. If you only have 3 Ratatta candies right now, how many more do you need to find (by catching more Ratatta Pokemon) in order to have enough to evolve it? Or, if you have 91 Ratatta candies and you need 25 to evolve it, how many candies will you have left over?
You can also encourage younger kids to count the number of different Pokemon they see in their “Nearby” Pokemon screen in the bottom right corner. Sometimes there is one, sometimes there are nine! The most common Pokemon can be fun to count too, as sometimes there could be several of the same kind of Pokemon all around you while on a walk in the fresh air, or when sitting in your car near a Poke Stop. The options could be endless on things you could have kids count, add, or subtract within the Pokemon Go game app.
Educational Benefits of Pokemon Go: Science
Being outdoors and experiencing nature first hand on their walks while adventuring (even if holding an electronic device in the process) is a fabulous way to bring up conversations in Science. As you are capturing snapshots of wild Pokemon with your device, consider it a goal to try to work in other animals, birds, or even trees and flowers into the pics.
No matter what subject you’d like to try applying to this app whether P.E. with walking long hikes to hatch those Pokemon eggs, or encouraging your child to read the “hints and tips”, you’re sure to have lots of material to work with that will make your child smile and enjoy learning these concepts while playing Pokemon Go.
Also published on Medium.
I agree that there are so many benefits to this game. I know some parents are excited that their kids are out of the house and moving.
Interesting. I downloaded the game this week and have been playing it. Didn’t think about educational benefits, but definitely makes sense.
It does have educational benefits. I keep running out of balls. I love that it gets my kids out of the house and moving. I’ve stopped at a church and the park this week. Also, the grocery store is a huge amount of fun.
I think it’s great to see so many people out and about discovering new places. I just wonder how much they are truly aware of their surroundings. But I agree with you, there is a lot of potential for learning.
Thanks for this. Most posts I’ve seen recently are trying to scare parents. Yes, if you let your 8-year old run around at night something bad might happen. Supervised and purposeful use of this game can be very educational, though.
[…] hand is at three, the little hand is at six, and that means it’s 3:30, it’s time for Pokemon Go!” When it’s dinner time, again, point out the time. Do this consistently to keep the memory […]