Doctoral students at UT research Pokemon Go

Imagine you’re walking down the river path, headed to the Center of Performing Arts for your final class of the day. All of the sudden your phone vibrates, you lift it up and to your great surprise a Dratini appears on your screen. This is the life of any avid Pokemon Go player who also happens to be a student here at UT.

By now, we have all heard about the huge new app that has been sweeping across the country: Pokemon Go. Students returning to the University of Toledo for the fall semester will be pleasantly surprised to find the campus they left in the spring has been transformed into a hotspot for Pokemon hunters and gym leaders.

On main campus alone you can find over a dozen Pokestops all over campus; three of which you can get to just by sitting in the Carlson Library. Which is good news for the average Pokemon fan, but maybe not such good news for those who are easily distracted from their studies by the highly addictive game.

This abundance of Pokestops in close proximity along with the multiple gyms available to battle and unique creatures spotted around has caused UT to become one of the many places across Toledo noticing a rise in pedestrian traffic. In fact, this trend has gotten so big that researchers at the university have started working on data collecting for the app.

Joseph Dake, the department chair of health and recreation at UT, has been working with doctoral students to gather data regarding the health aspect of the game. Amy Wotring and Victoria Wagner-Greene, both second-year doctoral health education students, have been working with Dake to gather information regarding the health, safety and addictive gaming aspects of the new app.

“Both of us were 90’s babies and we know all about Pokemon and we really liked it when we were younger so we were like let’s check this game out,” Wagner-Greene said.

She went on to explain that her and Wotring were actually playing the new game on campus when the idea struck them to do this research project.

“We were walking around and these two boys stopped us because they were looking for a Pikachu and we wanted to go find it with them. We were like what are you guys doing and they said they were from the University of Michigan and came down here to play Pokemon,” Wagner-Greene said. “I was just thinking in my head if people are traveling from Ann Arbor to Toledo just to catch these little, fake animals on their phones, there has to be more to this that we aren’t seeing.”

According to Wotring, the goal of the research is to use data collection to really figure out how this game is affecting the people who play it. They used a four-page survey with three pages of questions regarding the health, safety and addictive gaming aspects of playing the app and a page of demographic information for players to fill out.

The group of doctoral students went to six different Pokemon hot spots around Toledo to pass out their survey to players. This also included going to UT’s main campus during their Pokemon Go event as well as to the Botanical Gardens Pokemon Night and others.

Wagner-Greene also said the team had released the survey online, through personal emails, Facebook and Pokemon-Go forums. According to her, the results have been positive, with over 600 paper copies and over 1000 online submissions of the survey already collected.

“We’re excited that it was something that came on so fast and we were able to on behalf of UT do something so cool,” Wotring said. “People often think research is kind of dry and boring so to be able to take something that’s out there, fun and innovative and hopefully get enough information to further the health education field.”

Wotring and Wagner-Greene said that they, along with the other doctoral students, planned to spend the rest of the month working through the data they collected and plan to have the results of that data by the end of August.