Traffic Agent, a Pokémon Go for junior planners, lets students report problems on their walk to school and reshape the pedestrian landscape in Oslo Making the streets safer for schoolchildren is an important challenge, one that Vibeke Fredrikke Rørholt, a Norwegian researcher who has been studying traffic safety for 15 years, knows very well. But when she was approached by the city of Oslo and the country?s Agency of the Urban Environment and asked to make it easier for kids to walk to school, she took an unorthodox route. Instead of polling them, or sending surveys to teachers and parents, she took the simplest, most direct path to connect with students, and in the process, help them become unwitting urban planners: connect through their smartphones. The result is Traffic Agent, an interactive app that allows Oslo?s students to report obstructions and issues on their walks to and from school with just a few taps on their smartphone. The clever mobile game?students, or "spies," report issues to HQ, even sending in photos of unkempt bushes or damaged pavement?helps to create a real-time record of street-level issues. Consider it Pokémon Go for junior planners.

Screenshots from the Traffic Agent app

Since debuting last February, the app has spread across the Oslo school system, and logged more than 5,000 issues to be examined and improved. It?s a deceptively simple, and effective formula: children report, the city reacts, and the ...