Visual Culture and Pokémon Go

For those of us who have concluded our professional careers in education, coexisting with individuals possessing an analog mindset, transdigitals, and digital natives has been a fascinating experience. Howard Gardner and Katie David (1), in their work La generación APP, examined both the beneficial and detrimental aspects of APP technology within social and educational contexts.

In my final stage as a professor of technological university degrees (2), which are primarily focused on professional training, I observed that many students were accustomed to self-learning through digital content but often disconnected from the connections between art and science.

Occasionally, using the Augmented Reality application Pokémon Go (3) in class enhanced the understanding of technology’s evolution (4) in visual communication. By examining history from the present to the past, Pokémon Go facilitated the explanation of historical changes in aspects such as the three-dimensionality of images, the dimension of time, and the concepts of abstraction and fantasy.

The shared learning experience between faculty and students—forty years of experience juxtaposed with forty years of future—encouraged reflection on the connections between technology and humanistic knowledge.