THE DEVELOPMENT OF MENTAL MAPS USING POKEMON GO AS A TWIST ON GEOCACHING

One of the skills geoscience instructors hope to build in students is a sense of spatial awareness, which can be measured by having students create detailed mental maps. This presentation explores the impact of a mapping exercise using Pokémon Go on students’ ability to create mental maps of their campus.

Pokémon Go is an augmented reality game, released July 2016, in which students move around to locate Pokémon, or “pocket monsters” (Niantic, 2017). This cell phone-based game is similar to geocaching, in which people use a GPS receiver or mobile device to locate caches hidden by others (Jones 2013). The authors collaborated to write a set of timely lesson plans that took advantage of Pokémon Go’s popularity, but which are readily modified to use other caches as the game’s popularity wanes.

To assess how spatial awareness develops during a semester, students drew a mental map of campus at the beginning of a course and five weeks in. Students reported their confidence in their maps and how many semesters they had spent on campus, including whether they lived there. Drawings were analyzed to see what aspects of mental mapmaking (e.g. scale, orientation, accuracy, inclusion of campus landmarks) improved during the semester. Features analyzed were drawn from those reviewed by Gieseking (2013) and those identified as salient by instructors (e.g. campus landmarks). Students in the experimental group captured Pokémon along with geographic data from the Pokémon’s location, such as soil type and distance from a body of water. Data were also collected using other mobile apps, including CrowdMag, SoilWeb and Accuweather. In class, students aggregated the data using ArcGIS to map the location of the Pokémon relative to geographic data.

Students who completed the mapping exercise using Pokémon Go demonstrated a higher spatial awareness of their campus and were more likely than their counterparts to recall physical landmarks and place them accurately, as these were often associated with virtual landmarks within the game - for example, a PokéStop next to a frequently missed war memorial at Eastern Michigan. This exercise had a positive influence on students’ spatial awareness of campus, used a relatively small amount of in class time, was well-received by students, and is easily modifiable to take advantage of other geocaching resources.