Pokemon Go Mania

I have to admit that I am not a gamer. I enjoy watching others play but I’m all toes when I handle a game controller. However, the new Pokemon Go is so convenient simple that I’ve got it loaded for those few minutes when I can collect a creature, or for a quick photo op when our pet, Muffin, was bitten by a poke-bug :-) ; And it encourages walking to find those creatures. It’s a good motivator for those with collector obsession to exercise. Just don't walk into traffic or off cliffs -- yes, it has happened!

For those who don’t know what Pokemon is, then you’re definitely a rare creature that we want to see :-). Nintendo developed the Pokemon game and it’s spawned a whole industry of TV shows and movies, game cards, and other tangible collectibles. Pokemon is Japanese for pocket monster – mostly cute with some monstrous creatures but all PG-13. These creatures have different powers. Collect these monsters and you can use their powers to battle other monsters. It’s really a hyper extended form of rock-paper-scissor-shu. The Pokemon franchise is in its 20th year, a testament to its deep mythos and game play. Pokemon Go is an augmented reality game where you get to roam the real world in real time to find, collect, and battle -- virtually.

Mathnasium of Fort Lee is conveniently located between 3 pokestops that give you pokeballs, potions, and other goodies. Every 5 minutes, these pokestops refresh and I’m able to lazily collect stuff in the rare moments that there are no students to teach, and Ruby can’t see me "wasting" time. I’m at the collector stage. I’ve maxed out my bag and am loathed to throw anything away. Colette and Lydia provide advice on what to keep and what to throw. Mostly, I throw pokeballs at random monsters that appear, and since I’m laughably bad at throwing, I need many pokeballs. Befitting for a center located in a “city”, I’ve mostly caught rats, birds, and weevils – with fanciful names of “ratata”, “pidgey”, and “weedel”.

There are 150 pokemon at this stage, besting the periodic table of about 118. Given that most children can remember the names of 150 pokemon, it’s really not an excuse for them to not know some of the common elements – and no, “wind”, "water”, “fire”, and “metal” are not elements. BUT, learning words and names are good, and with some explanation of how those names were chosen and linking them to common names and scientific terms will bridge ideas. Bridging is what we care about at Mathnasium, it links ideas together, making memories resilient and encouraging recall.

Each of these 150 pokemon are grouped into 18 types, for example, fire, grass, electric, and poison. Within this type system, there are 324 possible ways to assign types to pokemon with 171 unique combinations. With some explanation, we’re thinking of using this idea to introduce our pokemon obsessed students to combinatorics.

For players who are into battling, a stage I’m far from and likely will never get to, here is an article by a statistics student who’s analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of pokemons to assemble the optimal monster army. Follow some of the article’s advice to see if you can really create the best possible creature portfolio; but I gather from his article that Nintendo has developed a fairly balanced system that is complex enough that everyone can have fun. https://bryansweber.com/2016/07/22/the-optimum-pokemon-portfolio-and-principle-component-decomposition-pcd-using-r/

Contact:

Ruby Yao and Benedict Zoe, Mathnasium of Fort Lee
www.mathnasium.com/fortlee
201-969-6284 (WOW-MATH), fortlee@mathnasium.com
246 Main St. #A
Fort Lee, NJ 07024

Happily serving communities of Cliffside Park, Edgewater, Fort Lee, Leonia, and Palisades Park.