#65 - A Pokemon Story
Hello Readers!
Today, I am going to tell you all a story! A Pokemon story. Pokemon is one of the biggest and most lucrative media franchises in the world. And so to make this week’s Microsoft Access Database project more engaging for my students, I have been making them do an Access Database in order to increase engagement and make them have more fun making databases.
Databases are kind of like Excel Spreadsheets and some of the terminology is the same. There are a couple of words that one needs to know:
Fields: these are like the names of the columns in a Excel Spreadsheets.
Records: these are like the rows in Excel that are numbered going down.
Query: this is kind of like the filters or a way to search through everything.
This project was definitely successful in having students input Pokemon data into the database. I still definitely think it has a lot of relevance, because students can then take this understanding and apply to many fields such as the medical field in which they will be working with patient records!!!
I want to tell a funny random story of a memory that I have about Pokemon growing up. Now that we are on the topic. It details a time before the Internet where people (especially kids) had to collaborate and ask each other for help. So here goes:
When I was a child, probably around the age of 10, I was in elementary school. During that time all the kids were really into Pokemon. Collecting the cards, playing the games on Gameboy and the new N64, going to Burger King/McDonalds to get merchandise, and of course going to see the movie! It was all the craze amongst kids! Now there was a magazine called, “Nintendo Power”, and they recently had a contest for the “most rarest Pokemon” in the entire world! They were giving away Mew on the GameBoy Advanced Color. I never did win that contest, but I was intrigued.
However, one day at school, I ended up finding out a random kid at school had won the contest and he knew how to copy Pokemon on Gameboy Advance! I was overjoyed and so I went to his house after school to get a copy. The funniest thing I can remember is walking through his house and seeing a random lady there going through one of his brother’s hair. They were looking for Lice and they started freaking out about it that they found some. Super random, but that’s the core part of the memory. Anyways, I went to the boy’s bedroom and that was where he had something called a GameShark. And he taught me how to copy things on Game Boy Advance. So I went ahead and got a copy and then I went to school and told all my friends. They all also wanted a copy of Mew.
So what did I do? I went ahead and copied it to all my other friend’s Game Boy Advances just in case I ever lost or broke my GameBoy. It was a really cool experience before the era of the Internet in which one had to read Magazines and talk to other people to gain information or help one another. We didn’t have Reddit for this type of thing! It just goes to show that even children sense this type of interaction was important and it was just what we had to do in order to get help or figure things out. Talking to other people and socializing with one another is still a great and wonderful tool, here in 2025. It’s incredible too how relevant and strong the Pokemon franchise is in 2025. Pokemon just announced a new game called Pokemon Z-A and there’s a new combat system in which you control the Pokemon instead of having it be turn based like it traditionally has been. Not only that, but they launched a lawsuit against Lawsuit. If they win the case then that will be huge for the franchise. And people are still playing, collecting, and watching everything Pokemon. It’s one of the biggest, if not the biggest Media franchises, in the world.
Anyways, I wanted to share this story and classroom project that we have conducting with my students.
Have a nice week! Almost to Spring Break!
-Calvin
