Well, oops! I discovered a ton of draft posts. I meant to post this during new student orientations this summer. But if your academic library participates in preview days, this could also be helpful. Here’s what I meant to post:

PokémonGo is everywhere, including libraries! Although summer is a little slower for those of us in college and university libraries, fall semester is almost here, and academic libraries are preparing welcome back events and orientations. Erin Washington, the library director of the Marie Blair Burgess Library at Spartanburg Methodist College in Spartanburg, South Carolina has designed her own version of the game. She shared her idea in the ili listserv.

Washington was already working on an augmented reality game using Aurasma, so she decided to rename it LibraryGo since everyone “know[s] what PokémonGo is even if they haven’t played it” (personal communication, July 13, 2016).

If you haven’t used Aurasma before, it is basically a way to link online content to an object in the real world (I used signs, a statue, a student ID card, and a screenshot, for example). If you’ve used QR codes for scavenger hunts before, it’s basically the same idea but is just more fun. When you walk around and use the Aurasma app, it feels like you are pulling images and videos out of the air when you find a “trigger.”

It is free to set up an account in Aurasma and fairly easy to create Auras. (My suggestion is to check the “lock” feature when you create an aura so that the students don’t have to keep their phone hovering over the trigger to make the content play.) If you would like to see my auras, download the Aurasma app and follow “eirini52105”.

The attached doc is the sheet I will give students to begin their search for “LibStops” (rather than PokeStops). Feel free to adapt this however you like, and borrow/edit my “LibraryGo” logo. The students will also receive one of our library iPads that will have the Aurasma app pre-downloaded for them. If you don’t have iPads to hand out, you could easily do this with phones as long as one student per group was willing to download the Aurasma app. This activity *I think* will take about 30 minutes, and I was considering doing a Kahoot Quiz as their “Pokémon Gym” battle for the remainder of class time, or perhaps the usual database demo.

Here is Washington’s second email about the Kahoot quiz mentioned in her July message.

Now that we are closer to the semester starting, I have had the time to create a simple Kahoot Quiz to go with LibraryGo. It’s got the Pokémon Go theme song at the beginning and Pokémon images that go with the questions. I’m hoping to use it as assessment to see if they learned anything, and/or learned it better than last year’s more traditional class. If you would like to use it or transform it for your purposes, do the following:

1) Sign in/Sign up with Kahoot at getkahoot.com.

2) Click Public Kahoots (up at the top)

3) Use hashtag #librarygo to find my quiz (author = eirini52105)

3) Click “Duplicate” to put this Kahoot into your “My Kahoots” area.

4) Click on MyKahoots (also up top) and then edit to change the questions to be your own. (Erin Washington, personal communication, August 4, 2016).

For more information, or to share other PokémonGo ideas, you can contact Washington at washingtone@smcsc.edu. A special thank you to Erin for allowing me to share her ideas on here.