Iowa State education researcher Emily Howell wrote about how Pokémon Go could help literacy in elementary schools in this week’s issue of The Reading Teacher. A paper published in the April issue of Media Psychology from University of Wisconsin researcher James Bonus and colleagues looks at how the game makes people happier and friendlier. A team of University of Washington presented a paper this week at an Association for Computing Machinery conference on how parents viewed the experience of playing the game with their kids.
While previous studies on augmented reality could only consider hardcore gamers, Pokémon Go was the genre’s first big crossover into the mainstream. “This afforded us with a unique opportunity to study the effects of augmented reality gameplay while including a lot of more casual gamers who we would usually miss.”
Both Bonus and the University of Washington team came up with their research ideas within the first week of the game’s release, while Howell wrote her paper in September after spending the summer playing the game with her children. All three papers underwent peer review from other scientists, a process of feedback and revision that creates a months-long gap before publication.
The fact remains that, however briefly, Pokémon Go was a culture-defining craze, at least for a minute, and that makes it interesting.
See the full story here: http://www.vocativ.com/428314/scientists-research-pokemon-vacant-augmented-reality/