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Dive Overview:
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As interest in e-sports grows, Each district develops its own curriculum. It draws connections to the competitive multiplayer gaming phenomenon, helping to capture students' interest and equip them with skills that will support their future careers.
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Linking classroom learning with esports helps foster discovery and learning, especially in STEM subjects, said Kevin Brown, the nonprofit's chief academic officer. Academic eSports Federation Network.
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But educators and stakeholders need to ensure the reasons for bringing esports into the classroom are academic. “We have to be intentional and thoughtful about it,” Brown said.
Dive Insights:
Brown, who is also a lecturer at Orange County School of the Arts and Santa Ana College, helped draft a curriculum that incorporates esports and online gaming into learning standards. NASEF developed the curriculum It's free, standards-compliant, and customizable.
Brown added that teachers can also draft lessons on their own, but that's a hit-or-miss approach.
The school Integrate competitive video games As career opportunities expanded, from competitive play to game design, I became actively involved in both curricular and extracurricular activities over the years.
Brown explains to educators that games that are indirectly related to subjects like physics or English don't necessarily incorporate a logical connection to esports: playing a game may be fun, but it doesn't by itself lead to achieving learning goals.
Brown recently worked with a biology teacher in Japan who was struggling to incorporate esports into his curriculum.
He asked educators what their students liked to learn and found that they loved learning about the five senses. “I said, 'How do video gamers play? They need eye-hand coordination.'
From there, the idea was born to design entire lessons on eye health using video games as a testing ground: Students would track metrics like how well they rested at night or what they ate during the day, then graph whether they improved while playing a game of their choice.
NASEF also: eSports Club At the high school level, there are more than 7,000 clubs, with 350,000 students participating worldwide, Brown said. Clubs can help open the door to classroom projects that could help spark student interest, such as creating a website for the club itself.
“If you take a web design class every year and your assignment is to create Flora's Flower Shop in HTML, that's boring,” Brown says. “But if you're learning to code to create a web presence for your club, that makes sense.”