The North America scholastic Esports Federation: Using Esports as a Trojan Horse for Connected Learning (Solomon, Anton, Salen-Tekinbas, Steinkuehler, Turner)
The rise of interest in esports at the collegiate level is mirrored by the rise of interest at the high school level as well, with more than a dozen youth esports leagues emerging in the last three years in the United States alone. Although few offer any formalized connection to learning or education, many make claims to fostering healthy attitudes toward school and toward peers. The North America Scholastic Esports Federation (NASEF), which launched last year in Orange County and this year expands to the US, Canada and Mexico, takes a different tack, using esports as a trojan horse for connected learning (Ito et al, 2013), or learning that connects students’ personal interests with peers and with academic, career, and/or civic achievement, as ""the most resilient, adaptive, and effective learning involves individual interest as well as social support to overcome adversity and provide recognition"" (Ito et al. 2013). The NASEF league and club structure directly connect academic content in authentic ways to esports play to enrich their gameplay and show young learners how school content across the disciplines is relevant to their everyday lives.
In this panel, NASEF leaders detail the goals and structure of the league and how it uses esports as a vehicle for learning in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), English Language Arts, Career Technical Education, and social-emotional learning. Panel speakers discuss their club versus team approach, the role of coaches and general managers (teachers) in the league, and the optional four-year accredited 4-year high school curriculum launched in Fall 2018 that accompanies the league clubs. Research findings from the year one formative evaluation are presented as well as the opportunities and challenges within this space.
Student-Designed Esports Communities as Site for Learning (Lee, Diaz, Reniva, Villafuerte, Liquez, Rodriguez, Pineda, Cortez, Lopez)
Educators have been examining the ways in which student assets developed outside of school, such as their knowledge, identities, interests and social networks, can be leveraged to design learning processes that build students’ educational, civic, political, and economic capital (e.g. Ito et al., 2013). While romantic assumptions that students are inherently drawn to digital gaming, or that engagement with digital gaming automatically facilitates the development of desired competencies such as digital literacies have been strongly contested, gaming, under the right circumstances, create opportunities to develop aforementioned learning assets outside of formal educational settings (Gee, 2003).
This paper describes a school-based collaborative design project between university researchers and a group of high school students named STAR (Student Technology Action Research) in which the authors of this paper were primary participants. The STAR project was initiated by university researchers to develop structures within an urban public school to facilitate the active participation of students in the design of school technology practices. Between the 2014-2017 school years, three university researchers, approximately 50 students, and 4 teachers with various forms of involvement and groupings, met on a weekly basis to co-design and implement technology practices that participants considered to be beneficial for school stakeholders. Within this broader work, a group of about 12 boys identified as Fable, organized regular eSports tournaments. By describing the processes of designing the Fable-organized eSports tournaments, we will consider the value of student-designed eSports spaces for educational communities, as well as the value of participating in the design of such spaces for students.
The Fable-organized eSports tournaments were initiated by a group of students, now all first-generation college students, who were avid gamers outside of school with the hope of raising the profile of eSports as a legitimate learning activity. Through the partnership with UCLA researchers, students studied and reflected on the role of the gaming tournaments in the school community, and made adjustments to the way the tournaments were organized. For example, when students attended a lecture on technology and human interaction at UCLA and learned that technology can either suppress or encourage meaningful communication among users, they ensured that the competitive nature of the gaming tournaments would be balanced by “free play” areas where students can have a safe space to learn about each other’s experiences across grade levels. By designing the tournaments, students collaborated with a number of stakeholders and developed key academic skills. Consequently, we believe that creating opportunities for students to design eSports communities in schools allows the creation of spaces that respond to the needs and wants of students, and to develop valuable skills that travel beyond eSports.
Using API Data from League of Legends to Understand the Impact of Coaching on High Schoolers’ Play Style (Gerber, Pasquini & Sweeney)
This presentation examines a university-sponsored eSports summer camp for high school students. This mixed methods study (Sequential design, qual+QUAN), explores how a summer camp coaching program lead to each player’s growth. Eighteen high school and middle schools students attended a three-day, sleepover, summer-camp focused on eSports. Participants of varying skill levels were placed in teams of three to play League of Legends. Twelve had no prior experience in League of Legends and six had prior experience in League of Legends. Over the course of the three-day camp, players practiced the game together and took part in many team-building exercises. Qualitative data were collected via post-camp interviews to better understand player perception of a) the nature of coaching received; b) perceived coaching effectiveness; and c) general attitudes about the camp. Quantitative data were collected using a Riot Games API. API data were collected from a set number of games pre-camp and post-camp from the players who had prior League of Legends experience. Data included kills, deaths, assists, and vision score (a team-oriented metric) to investigate whether there was appreciable difference in the participant’s play style after the camp. Analysis was in two steps: first, we grouped the games for all six players together into a single sample, and conducted a t-test analysis to determine if there was a significant difference in the gameplay metrics of kills, deaths, assists, and vision score in games played pre-camp versus post-camp. Second, individual players were investigated separately using a t-test for individual differences in gameplay metrics. By first looking at all the camp participants we determined general trends in their play during the games pre- and post-camp, and examined if those general trends held amongst all camp participants individually, or if there were a few participants that were driving the results of the analysis. There was a statistically significant difference in the vision scores pre-camp versus post-camp. The difference in kills was significant, with players scoring more kills pre-camp than post-camp. The difference in deaths was also statistically significant, with slightly more player deaths pre-camp than post-camp. Finally, the difference also statistically significant for assists, which was slightly lower pre-camp than post-camp. The second step of the analysis examined whether these changes in the recorded metrics were due to drastic play style changes for individual players or a more general change in the way all players included in the study played the game. A t-test comparing mean variable scores pre-camp and post-camp was conducted independently for all players. These results show that while less than half of camp participants experienced play changes that were
