If you’re a parent, or you know one with a toddler, you’ll know how challenging it can be to teach practical skills to a toddler, especially brushing teeth. In my case, dealing with my daughter running away and clamping her mouth shut when I ask her to brush is a common scene in our house. Knowing that gamification can effectively be utilised to make learning motivating and engaging for children (Behnamnia et al., 2023; Li et al., 2024; Utami & Crescenzi-Lanna, 2025), I decided to explore a millennial approach to this – I grabbed my iPad and searched for a solution on the App store. While looking for a way to make brushing teeth enjoyable for her, I came across an advertisement for Pokémon Smile. As a millennial father, avid Pokémon fan, and animation researcher who spent way too many hours catching Pokémon on my Game Boy back in high school, I was naturally intrigued to find out more about this app.
Pokémon Smile (LITALICO, 2020) is a free mobile app available on iOS and Android. This app is designed to make the process of brushing teeth fun for children by using engaging animated elements in augmented reality. To make the activity of brushing teeth enjoyable, this app lets kids catch and collect Pokémon after fighting cavity-causing bacteria by brushing their teeth properly. The combination of several sensory elements in this app makes it an effective learning tool. According to Multimodal Learning (Lorina, 2024), the combination of various modes and representations, such as visual, auditory, kinesthetics, digital, and textual can enhance children’s engagement in a learning process.
In teaching children, particularly in the early childhood years (ages 1-8), multimodality is a suitable approach of learning for children that do not have reading and writing skills at a level where they can engage in a traditional academic setting (Crane-Deklerk, 2020). Multimodality enables children to learn by engaging with their senses and environment through various modes. In this context, multimodality becomes a suitable tool for teaching practical skills that can be learned through doing, rather than by listening to or reading step-by-step instructions. This is evident in how this app uses various modes of engagement to teach kids a mundane task of brushing their teeth.
Pokémon Smile utilises this multimodal approach by implementing the key elements identified by Lorina (2024), including diverse modalities, digital integration, empowerment and choice, play and social interactions, and collaborative learning. In using diverse modalities, the app combines visuals (Pokémon characters), sounds in the form of music and sound effects for rewards, and the child’s real-world tangible action of brushing teeth. The element of digital integration demonstrated by the app through showing the reflection of the child on screen in real-time, allowing children to see themselves brushing teeth inside the app. Empowerment and choice are reflected in the game mechanics, as children can ‘catch’ Pokémon when they finish their brushing session and by choosing their preferred digital accessories. These provide a sense of agency and responsibility. Play, social interaction and collaborative learning are supported by the participation of parents or guardians to encourage the children’s active involvement in their own learning.
The app itself works like a camera filter in social media platforms, similar to Snapchat or Instagram. With the front facing camera on, the app adds Pokémon themed virtual accessories, such as hat, glasses, or in some cases an animated image of a Pokémon being tracked to the face captured by the camera. In addition, a visual of the bottom teeth appears on the screen, showing purple-coloured smoke lingering on them. A Pokémon–either Pikachu or Eevee, selected the first time after creating an account–is animated on the gums, attacking the purple shadow representing bacteria in the mouth as long as the child continues brushing. Throughout the session, the visuals are paired with cheerful music and distinct sound effects of Pokémon attacking its enemy that encourage kids to keep brushing.
Figure 1. My daughter brushing her teeth with the help of Pokémon Smile.
The app can detect if a child stops brushing midway or slows down while brushing. In such cases, it displays encouraging textual messages like, “Brush your teeth harder” and “Don’t slow down” and the visual and audio elements pause immediately if the face is no longer detected by the camera. A visual prompt of the teeth area or “map” that needs to be cleaned is visible on the bottom right of the screen, functioning as visual cue for children to brush that specific area. After completing the brushing session, indicated by a countdown at the top of the screen, the purple smoke gradually vanishes, revealing a Pokémon that can be caught by swiping a Poké Ball upward on the screen. The Pokémon caught can then be checked in the Pokédex menu on the main menu screen (Figure 2), encouraging kids to keep brushing and “collect them all”. Further enhancing the sense of achievement, kids occasionally receive new virtual accessories that they can use in future brushing sessions. In addition, the main menu display medals the child has earned or can earn, adding another layer of motivation to keep completing the game.
Figure 2. Pokémon collected from previous brushing sessions, categorised by types and appropriate environment.
I am aware that relying on screens or animated content to encourage habits in children is not without its problems. I still remember the days when as students of art and design–particularly animation–we were trained to create engaging content though the use of colour theory and other techniques, learning how to capture people’s (children’s) attention, not knowing that it sometimes sparks overstimulation.
Concerns over the effects of smart devices on younger generations also have been raised not only in academic research but also in mainstream public discourse (Haidt, 2024; Hari, 2022; Lillard & Peterson, 2011; Vasconcellos et al., 2025). The irresponsible use of smart devices evidently harms young generations as it disrupts traditional childhood experiences and contributes to numbers of mental health and attention problems, such as social deprivation, anxiety, depression and reduced capability for deep focus and concentration, as smartphone addiction fragments attention.
Having said that, to soften the blows, there is this nice built-in limitation in the app that offer some relief. Right after finishing a brushing session, the app can’t be used immediately. The user must wait for eight hours before the next session. This little feature can reduce the risk of excessive screen time and addiction.
In conclusion, yes there is a concern over kids spending too much time on screens, but I also think that in small doses, app like Pokémon Smile that utilises interactive animated elements and AR technology can be very helpful to turn a mundane and boring chores like brushing teeth into a fun activity kids actually look forward to. This app cleverly blends colourful visuals, cheerful sounds, animated characters, and on-screen prompts as key elements of multimodal learning. By integrating these sensory layers with the tactile act of brushing teeth, makes a daily task enjoyable for little kids. Used wisely and with a bit of assistance from Mum and Dad, it’s a nice reminder of how animated products can turn a daily struggle into a small victory, and maybe even save me one breath that I would otherwise use chasing my daughter around the house to brush her teeth.
References
Behnamnia, N., Kamsin, A., Ismail, M. A. B., & Hayati, S. A. (2023). A review of using digital game-based learning for preschoolers. Journal of Computers in Education, 10(4), 603–636. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40692-022-00240-0
Crane-Deklerk, K. (2020). Multimodality in Early Childhood Education. International Journal of Literacy, Culture, and Language Education, 1, 73–87. https://doi.org/10.14434/ijlcle.v1i0.29481
Haidt, J. (2024). The anxious generation: How the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness. Penguin Press.
Hari, J. (2022). Stolen focus: Why you can’t pay attention–and how to think deeply again. Crown.
Li, X., Yang, Y., & Chu, S. K. W. (2024). How does gamification bring long-term sustainable effects on children’s learning? Implications from a crossover quasi-experimental study. Educational Technology Research and Development, 72(3), 1357–1381. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-023-10341-x
Lillard, A. S., & Peterson, J. (2011). The Immediate Impact of Different Types of Television on Young Children’s Executive Function. Pediatrics, 128(4), 644–649. https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2010-1919
LITALICO. (2020). Pokémon Smile [IOS, Android]. The Pokémon Company. https://smile.pokemon.com/en-us/
Lorina, L. (2024, December 16). Multimodal Representations In Early Childhood [Article]. Aussi Childcare Network. https://aussiechildcarenetwork.com.au/articles/childcare-articles/multimodal-representations-in-early-childhood?
Utami, A., & Crescenzi-Lanna, L. (2025). Research design and implementation of digital play and digital games-based learning in early development (0 to 6 years): A systematic review. Education 3-13, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/03004279.2025.2537102
Vasconcellos, R. P., Sanders, T., Lonsdale, C., Parker, P., Conigrave, J., Tang, S., Del Pozo Cruz, B., Biddle, S. J. H., Taylor, R., Innes-Hughes, C., Salmela-Aro, K., Vasconcellos, D., Wilhite, K., Tremaine, E., Booker, B., & Noetel, M. (2025). Electronic screen use and children’s socioemotional problems: A systematic review and meta-analysis of longitudinal studies. Psychological Bulletin, 151(5), 513–543. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000468
Christian Aditya is a PhD Candidate at the school of media and communication, RMIT University. His PhD is a creative practice research that explores Chinese Indonesian identity through non-fiction animation works. Through a combination of personal reflection and collective narratives, his work engages with themes of cultural inheritance, memory, and identity, aiming to reimagine how underrepresented histories can be expressed through animated forms. You can access his website at christianaditya.com.