GLS Conference

In 2017, we helped design, develop, and launch a novel “enriched esports” program for youth with academic, career and social-emotional learning built into its design. Based on close analysis of the professional and collegiate esports scene, we mapped out key roles within the esports ecosystem, tied those roles to academic standards, created enrichment materials and activities to cultivate those connections, and then spent the next four years evaluating its impact – not only on academic interests and affiliation but also on communication, self-regulation, and social-emotional skills. Each year, we crept closer and closer to the great Moby Dick of after-school interest-driven program: empirical rigor.

We followed the steps: Exploratory qualitative work the first, year, trend studies and group comparisons the second, pretest/posttest quasi-experimental design in year three, and then at long last, an alternative one sample pretest-posttest design (Johnson, 1986) that promised to allow us to disambiguate program outcomes from teen maturation, testing effects, historical effects and the like. And then…

Covid happened.

In this presentation, we investigate the devil in the data during our year of unexpected experimental disruption, social isolation among our participants, and unexpectedly positive-ish findings from using the world’s most notoriously competitive (and toxic) context for gameplay as a source for connection, collaboration, and change. Here, we explore how a fairly dicey context for gameplay became a lifeboat for kids and get real about the challenges of finding rigor under even the best of circumstances when it comes to interest-driven programming for kids.