Pokemon pedagogy

PokemonGo, a game using augmented reality, landed in Finland this summer. All of the sudden you could see kids walking about staring at their phones. I first thought that it was a great thing to get them to play outdoors but there certainly wasn´t anything in it for me. Well, I was wrong. With some help from my son I decided to try it, just to see what it was all about. I didn´t expect to get hooked! Soon I was wandering about staring at my phone, too. After I fell once, I learned not to stare at the phone, just to hold it in my hand, ready to catch Pokemons.

When school started I started thinking that Pokemons could help me in my teaching. One of the themes for this year is getting to know our own village called Kellokoski. It´s a village built around a waterfall that gave power to a metal factory. It produced a range of things from aluminium boats to milk containers. Nowadays it´s best known for a large mental hospital.

There are several pokestops in interesting places. One of them is at the statue of a man who lived to be 101 years old, was the manager of the local metal works, founder of the local brass band, a composer and a lot of other things, too. The younger generation has no idea who he was.

The statue of Totti Carlander

I gave a group of pupils the task of finding out who he was, another group had to find out about the history of the village church, yet another group about the old dam and so forth. Then we set out for a walk. I promised them they could visit all the pokestops along the road and pick up any pokemons they found. At each pokestop the group in charge told us about the history of the place. There were things I didn´t know like the beautiful park around the church being a former market place. I had assumed that the statue of Carlander had been erected after his death, but my pupils found out that he had actually partcipated in the unveiling ceremony at the age of 98 years.                                            

Our village church, built in 1800.

We had some fresh air and exercise, learnt about our surroundings and found some pokemons. Even the most unmotivated pupil was happy because everyone had something interesting along the way.