GameBoy fills new niche — education

SANDY — Pete Suarez and Jo Ann Holferty want youngsters to use a GameBoy to do more than learn about Pokemon, Super Mario or Zelda.

Like learning instead about math, science and history.

Their company, Pocket Direct LLC, is an official Nintendo publisher that has produced Pocket Professor KwikNotes, a cartridge for various GameBoy platforms that features basic information about several educational subjects, allowing the devices to be used for education rather than play.

"The whole idea behind KwikNotes is immediate access to that once-learned, easily forgotten and frequently hard-to-find information that keeps popping up during junior and high school years," Suarez said. "Not unlike Cliff Notes, we took 'War and Peace,' in effect, and squished it down here, taking out all but the essential information."

For example, a GameBoy user can easily get details from Jupiter to the Jurassic Period, from cell mitosis to multiplication, from capitalization to chemistry.

"This is what we're bucking right now: That it's a game machine," said Suarez, the company's president. "It's a sophisticated piece of hardware, and it can do more things than just learning how to steal cars and blowing things up. We wanted to take a whole new approach to this thing."

Suarez and Holferty see KwikNotes as a potential personal tutor, study hall aid, homework helper and refresher for those taking ACT and SAT exams, among other uses. With a goal of having valuable information accessible in an easy-to-use, engaging format in a mobile device, the company crammed the information onto a single cartridge available for $44.95 at www.pocketprofessor.com.

"We've taken libraries of information and condensed it into what you see there," Holferty, vice president of new business development, said while pointing to a stack of books and booklets about 6 inches deep, "and then condensed that further into the cartridge that goes into the GameBoy. It's amazing how many textbooks have been used and how many teachers' guides have been used to construct this information."

Suarez said KwikNotes is an alternative to other information sources, such as textbooks or the Internet.

"For an assignment, what we found out, they (students) will take the path of least resistance to finding out information," he said. "Where the Internet is an incredible source of information, it can be very distracting and even somewhat dangerous. So this is an alternative to that. It's a tutor, it's an alternative to the Internet or can augment what might be on the Internet, and it can help parents become more involved in what the kids are doing with their education."