eSports in Education

by James O'Hagan, Director of Digital & Virtual Learning, Racine Unified School District

Coming this fall, one of the most watched sports competitions on the planet will occur in the United States. San Francisco, New York, Chicago and Los Angeles will be host cities for this competition. You may think I am talking about baseball’s World Series. However, I am talking about the League of Legends World Championships. The future of sports is eSports.

League of Legends is a game (one of many) that is part of a larger genre called eSports. eSports encompasses all forms of organized competitive video game play. If you have not taken the time to examine this game, it requires two teams of five students to actively plan strategy similar to chess in real time and an ever changing environment while working together to capture their opponent's home base. Watching the game in real-time and you start to see creativity, communication, collaboration and critical thinking (the 4Cs) are alive and well and very necessary for students to master in order to be successful. And with 67 million League of Legends players (a number larger than the population of France), chances are many of your middle and high school aged students have played the game before.

The 4Cs are modern skills we wish every student to master. Yet, most schools and classrooms do a very poor job of imparting these skills. Usually, imparting these skills falls to a special one-time activity that allows the teacher to check off a box on their list of to-dos for this school year. It is artificial and does little to get the students using any of these skills in a practical sense.

But one of the most compelling components of eSports is an often overlooked 5th C - community. In 2005, there were 58 million eSports enthusiasts (defined as regular viewers and/or participants). In 2014, there were 89 million enthusiasts with another 117 million occasional viewers. By 2017, the projections indicate there will be 145 million enthusiasts. Millions of dollars are being earned by pro players of all ages. ESPN and TNT just made major investments in eSports. There are at least 5 scholarships available for eSports competitors. According to James Bates at ESPN:

“In 2014, for the first time, a streamed game’s broadcast attracted more viewers than the NBA Finals. More than 27 million people around the world tuned in to League of Legends World Championship. A year later, more than 31 million people watched SK Telecom T1 beat KOO Tigers 3-1 for the 2015 title and a split of a $1 million prize.”

There are career and classroom implications with eSports. Over 120,000 people are employed in the US in the video game industry, an industry that generated $111 billion worldwide in 2015. But as Kotaku writer Rob Zacny points out, the future of eSports is complicated and messy. The lack of organization and governmental rules in eSports is similar to the early days of football in the United States. The state of football became so dire that Teddy Roosevelt brought the coaches of Harvard, Yale and Princeton to the White House to discuss changes to the rules to make the sport safer and remove unsportsmanlike conduct.

There is an opportunity to attract students into a unique extracurricular sport, particularly those students who do not already compete in athletics. By attracting these students to participate in eSports, it can potentially reduce dropout rates and increase local test scores as students work to stay eligible to compete. For our athletic boosters, there is an opportunity for a new stream of parents to become involved.

Schools should have a prominent role in adopting eSports and bringing them under the umbrella of their sports conferences that already have rules of organization and sportsmanship. If schools and state athletic organizations can build rules and regulations around eSports, in partnership with organizations like the High School Star League, we can then begin to harness the enthusiasm of our children into a positive and safe eSports experience. It is important for schools and state athletic organizations to get out in front of this now.