Gotta Catch ‘Em All?
A global gaming sensation holds lessons for engineering educators that go well beyond technology fads.
By Aditya Johri
If you have paid any attention to the news lately, you have likely come across the phenomenon of Pokémon Go—a new game in which real people catch digital monsters in real places. Even I, an information technology researcher, found it hard to conceptualize the goals of the game, yet that’s exactly what occurs.
Pokémon Go takes common smartphone technologies, such as GPS, mapping, and satellite services, and combines them with location services, local landmarks, and Nintendo’s familiar characters to provide players an engaging augmented reality experience. I heard a commentator on NPR compare it to the Macarena, a dance craze that came and went very quickly. Another expert likened it to the ephemeral Ice Bucket Challenge.
Only time will tell if Pokémon Go is so transient a spectacle, but even so, the game has conclusively demonstrated the power of digital technology to capture imaginations and create an engaging platform from little pieces of information that come together in a digital-physical ecosystem. And this is a development that deserves serious attention from engineers and engineering educators.
We live in an era of profound change. Engineering practices and products are permeated with a digital layer, and this digitization—whether applications, data, analysis tools, or collaborative media—is fundamentally changing the profession. Digitization also is shaking the very core of engineering identity by demonstrating the opportunities for making a positive change but also alerting us to the limitations we face or have placed on ourselves. We now have an opportunity and duty to reflect upon and review the world of engineers and engineering from a digital lens and ask ourselves: What are the possibilities, what is achievable, where would we like to go, and how can we get there? My goal in this column is to continually reflect on how the digitization of artifacts, data, interactions, and practices has the potential to shape what we accomplish as engineers and engineering educators.
What can we learn from Pokémon Go? For starters, the game demonstrates the first successful, large-scale amalgamation of the digital and physical worlds and showcases the “augmented reality” that we’ve been talking about for decades. Imagine what this ability to superimpose a digital layer can do for engineering—point your phone at a bridge and presto, you can receive all associated information about its structure and history and at the same time add, create, enhance, and contribute to that body of knowledge. Second, Pokémon Go invites anywhere, anytime interactions with others who may be very different from you and know a lot more (or less) about a subject. This interconnectedness not only makes an activity socially relevant but also allows for knowledge generation and learning. If you look at that bridge and don’t find some information, you can share your experience and let someone else guide you.
For engineering educators, Pokémon Go’s singular strength is that it represents the collaboration of engineers (at Google) and artists (from Nintendo), working together to build on so much that has come before, from the characters to the data feeding the local PokéStops. It is truly an exemplar of the interdisciplinarity that engineering purports to thrive on but is hard to see in action. The digital layer provides a happy medium for ideas and products to gel. Moreover, the game demonstrates the advantage of understanding your users. If they are connected and comfortable with a “good enough” experience, they will engage with a game that is less than a full immersion as long as it easily fits with their everyday practices.
Pokémon Go’s novelty doesn’t lie in technology—that’s been available for a while—but in its melding of old and new to create a hybrid that didn’t exist before. Isn’t that the essence of learning? Differential equations may never achieve the cachet of capturing a a lazy-looking Snorlax, but think of the deeper understanding students might acquire pursuing knowledge in an augmented-reality classroom. Where we go from here is up to us.
Aditya Johri is an associate professor in the department of information sciences and technology at George Mason University’s Volgenau School of Engineering and co-editor of the Cambridge Handbook of Engineering Education Research.