Many high school kids spend a lot of time playing video games, their parents worrying that they should be studying instead. Every Victory Royale is time wasted away from textbooks. But now there is a curriculum that aims to meet those kids where they play, tapping directly into that love of esports.
Developed by the North America Scholastic Esports Federation (NASEF) with help from the University of California Irvine (UCI), the curriculum spans all four years of high school. It covers everything from game design to entrepreneurship to hospitality. NASEF also serves as a league for high schools to compete against each other in esports. The organization was previously called the Orange County High School Esports League but changed its name in pursuit of its goal of nationwide adoption.
“You see the same effects for esports leagues that you do in sports programs in general,” said Constance Steinkuehler, a professor at UCI and one of the main developers of the curriculum. “We’ve seen a decrease in absenteeism, an increase in feeling associated with school, and an increase in positive relationships with teachers.”
Steinkuehler is one of the leading researchers in this space. Before coming to UCI she served as a Senior Policy Analyst in the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House Executive Office. Now she studies how schools can connect esports and academics.
“We are getting kids who identify themselves as people who care about school,” Steinkuehler said. “You would be shocked to see what it means to just acknowledge what their play spaces are. That they are legitimate and interesting and require skill, instead of denigrating with old stereotypes.”
Classes are not electives, and the curriculum is expansive. It is a full four-year program that meets the collegiate requirement for English, but draws connections to science and technology.
“Our first thought was that [esports] is obviously STEM tied so let’s try to develop that curriculum,” Steinkuehler explained. “We realized it’s impossible to teach things like chemistry content through [esports] so we began looking for another domain. The English Language Arts program was perfect. So much reading and writing is done as a natural part of esports. Instead of being a STEM replacement, we created an English program that is infused with STEM lessons.”
Steinkuehler believes that segregating schooling into individual areas of study is an antiquated way of thinking about education.
“You have English and humanities in one corner, science in a different corner, and math in another,” she said. “That’s not how the world comes at you. Those are artifacts of old systems of education. When you look at things in the real world—like esports—they don’t come at you from one discipline, they come at you from many.”
High school students are going to play video games no matter what, and this curriculum offers them a chance to learn more about that industry. The ultimate goal, though, is to give students a better way to learn by helping them associate their lessons with their world.
“This is not about sports, this is not about esports, and this is not about play. This is about learning,” said Gerald Solomon, Executive Director of the Samueli Foundation, another key partner in developing the NASEF. “The nexus and connection between learning and play so kids can see the real world impact of what it means to learn. Today there is a disassociation between school and real world. If you talk to 100 kids, I would venture 99 would say, ‘why am I learning this? why are we doing this?’
“When you take esports and make it a part of the curriculum, as a core requirement and component, you gain the opportunity to develop social and emotional skills while teaching traditional components like English, physics and math.”
After a successful first season of the OC High School Esports League, the group finished the curriculum and is pushing to expand nationwide. Solomon is in the process of talking with educators in Tampa Bay who want to adopt the curriculum for their schools. He also sees this curriculum as something that will reach beyond high school and be adopted for a wide variety of educational opportunities.
“We have created the framework so it can be embedded in an ELA program high school, in an after-school program, in a girl scouts or boy scouts troop, in a junior college, in a YMCA,” Soloman said. “It’s the concept of how do you take the learning as a framework and add the play in.”