 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Porter here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly webinar series where we cover a variety of topics that may be of interest to libraries. We broadcast the show live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time, but if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's fine. We do record the show as we are doing today, and you can watch the recordings at your convenience, and I will show you at the end of today's show where you can access all of our archives. Both the live show and the recordings are free and open to anyone to watch, so please do share with your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, anyone who you think might be interested in any of the topics we have on Encompass Live. For those of you who are not from Nebraska, the Nebraska Library Commission is the state agency for libraries in Nebraska. We are the state library. So in other states, it might be the so-and-so state library, and here in Nebraska, it's the Nebraska Library Commission serves those purposes, and we provide training and education and support to all types of libraries in the state. So you will find things on our Encompass Live show for all types of libraries, things for publics, academics, K-12 corrections, special museums, archives, anything and everything are really our only criteria that is something for libraries, something libraries that are doing, something cool things you think they could be doing. We sometimes have Nebraska Library Commission staff come on and do presentations about things that we are offering here through the Library Commission, but we're bringing guest speakers from around the state and around the country as well. And before we do get into today's show, I'm going to do a quick pop over to our Library Commission homepage here, and I just want to give a reminder here to all of our libraries here in Nebraska. As everyone knows, we are still in the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, and here in Nebraska, we are gathering resources to help our libraries deal with what's going on. We have a post here that is pinned to the top of our Library Commission homepage that will always be there, no matter what new things we post, about what resources that you can use as a library. We have a list. We are attempting to maintain as well as we can as we hear from libraries where we notice that they are closing. We started all of this back in March. So if library is closed, if it's opened, special accommodations, Wi-Fi in the parking lot, et cetera, and now re-closings in many areas across the whole country, there are surges and flare-ups in places that were open have to now re-close again. So we're trying to keep up on that. But if you go to this link here for our resources, we have some maps, but we have a sub-page here with information that can help you with dealing with helping your patrons, about my business, unemployment, what to do with my kids, homeschooling, et cetera. The second link here is specifically resources for libraries to help you with what to do about closing, reopening, testing that's being done, information from ALA, IMLS, the CDC, World Health Organization, all the acronyms, specifically for school libraries, how to hold open meetings. And now you can see here this is specific to Nebraska, of course, some of this, because this is our Nebraska page, this is our Nebraska State Statues regarding open meetings. If you're not from Nebraska, look into your own state and just a whole bunch of other resources. So this is just free out there for anybody to use or trying to keep it up as we can. If you're in Nebraska Library, keep an eye on these pages. We're updating it when we can. If you're not from Nebraska, you're welcome to use any of these links, as long as they're not the ones that are Nebraska specific. But check in with your state library or your state library association, and they may be doing the same thing for you. So on to today's show, I am going to hand over presented control to you, Diane, right now. Do that pop up. And today, let's get your screen up and then there we go. And then get it presenting full screen. Make sure it does the right one. There it is. All right, today, we're going to be talking about something personally near and dear to my heart. I am a big gamer. I see the first time I played a video game was Atari something when I was in middle school. I don't even remember. Asteroids was my first favorite game. But eSports and evidence-based connected learning. This was a presentation that has been done. I first noticed it at a public library association annual conference back in February, right? As we were talking earlier, that seems like so long ago, but. And this is some great, we've been promoting, doing video gaming and tournaments in libraries for years here in Nebraska, and I know it's been happening all over the country. But specifically, eSports is something relatively newer, I think, to libraries, maybe more official. But I'm just going to hand it over to you guys, Kevin, Diane and Tyler, to introduce yourself and tell us all about how to do this. Yeah, definitely. So I'll go ahead and start. My name is Tyler Hawn and I am your neighbor to the east. I'm the director of the Cherokee Public Library in Cherokee, Iowa. I'm Diane Connery, the accidental director of the Potsboro library. Potsboro is in North Texas. It's a rural community about an hour and a half north of Dallas. Hello, everyone. My name is Kevin Brown. I am the eSports program specialist. That's a fancy title for a guy who makes eSports happen in various spaces. I work with the Orange County, California Department of Education, where I'm a credentialed teacher at middle school and high school. Also, I have this position with NACEP, the North America Scholastic eSports Federation. Awesome. So I'll go ahead and start. So here's a little bit of our overview slash agenda for today, sort of some of your learning outcomes. We're going to cover Scholastic eSports, some of Kevin's favorite stuff. The research behind this curriculum slash program models that you can go ahead and adopt for your library or learning space, clubs, competition, and then examples from our libraries. So kind of before we go ahead and get started, we all like, we're all gamers here. Diane, you're a gamer too, right? Well, do you count block puzzle? I count block puzzle. You don't count that. So what percentage of adults do we think are into gaming? Do we think it's more or less than teens gaming? How many of us have teens gaming at our library? I know, I know back in the beyond the before, you know what, we had 11 public service computers at my library that were open for in our youth department. All of them were constantly filled from the minute school was out, you would just see this mighty Zephyr come in and you know what, all of a sudden there were just bodies there in the chairs playing roblox and the like. And then you know what, it was right until one minute before we close, they were sitting there gaming. So, hmm, what are we thinking? And I know, you know, it might be a little bit hard to interact with this model and everything, but you have a good chat. Yeah. Yeah, if you have any thoughts, everyone in the audience type into the question section, what you think. So you think who plays games in the library? Who plays games in general? Who plays games in general? What percentage of Americans play games in general adults versus teens? So, Diane, could you go ahead and so yeah, 49% of adults go ahead? I was going to guess higher. Right. And you know what, it could be a little bit higher, especially, you know, with COVID going on, I'd like to go ahead and more of that data because I know there's a lot of us that are waiting for our PlayStation 5s. I was in my car and then it disappeared. I'm terribly sad. What percentage of teens do we think go ahead and play games? 112%. Right. 97%. That is just an astronomical number. So more than likely you and your libraries are seeing similar situations going on. So we'll go ahead. We'll continue on. So that's where a lot of this, the eSports programming kind of goes into is we're meeting kids where they are. Kids are already utilizing these online worlds as their third spaces. But we're seeing kind of now through the pandemic. These are kind of becoming their second spaces as well. Whereas they used to go ahead and meet up and chat in school. We don't have that option anymore or right now. I shouldn't say anymore right now. So we're going ahead there. They're connecting online with these shared spaces. Gaming has always kind of acted as one of those shared interest spaces, which is really neat. So we'll go ahead and we'll continue. eSports is a world of competitive video games. So you take. Have you ever seen pineapple pineapple pen? We're OK. Kevin, you're shaking your head. You're not following me here. OK, so you have competition and you have gaming. That's where you get to eSports. It's most commonly eSports takes the form of organized multiplayer online video game competitions. You don't have to do that, though. There's no hard and fast rules about eSports. It is what you make it. But you know what it is. It's massive and it's rapidly growing. This industry is just exploding with live broadcasts and commentary, and there's so many more career clusters that are affiliated with eSports. It awards prize money and awards to competitors. And you know, it's one of the really interesting things is that it rivals traditional American sports, especially in viewership. Now, when do you think this picture was taken based on how they're dressed in the 60s? Yeah, you're actually fairly close. So this is one of the very first like eSports competitions that's regularly referred to. The game was Space Wars, and it was 1972. The prize for winning this was a year's subscription to Rolling Stone magazine. Awesome. Look at their gaming uniforms, the skinny ties. I like that. I think we need to bring that back, Kevin. That's an interesting cross over Rolling Stone and video gaming. They need to get back into that business. Yeah, definitely. So just these these eSports tournaments, they're also being I'm sure people are thinking about these are streaming online. They're on regular TV. We that's exactly it. If you can through the, you know, the 10 or 15 different ESPN channels that you own that we have. You can we've my husband and I have watched overwatch. Heroes of the Storm, various tournaments on cable primetime TV. Yeah. Well, and if you look right here, just going right into that. The 2017 2017 League of Legends Championship drew in over 106 million viewers. That is immense compared that to the 2018 Kentucky Derby with 15 million. These sporting events are being broadcast and they really are catching eyeballs. It's it's where we're moving towards for watching our on where we're moving forward to go ahead and watch our sports. And if you go ahead and you look at the growth projected, it's going to grow even bigger. And then, you know, one of the interesting things is that you can actually go ahead and have a scholarship to college to go and play eSports. I know locally there's a college 50 miles away, Morningside College in Sousa, Iowa that has an eSports team. They offer students scholarship money just as much money as they would offer a football team or a football player or a tennis player to go ahead and play for their eSports team. Likewise, community colleges are getting into this as well. Iowa Lakes Community College is currently looking for a head eSports coach. How about you, Diane? What what's happening local in Potsboro? So here I am in a rural town, about 2,300 people in North Texas. And I found out, did not know before I started this project that the liberal arts school, Austin College, which is about 30 minutes away, has an eSports team. And I'll talk about it a little later. I've ended up using some of their players as coaches for our team. And that has produced all kinds of benefits that I hadn't even imagined. So it's it is in this area. And actually in Dallas, one of the first ways I heard about this was an arena was built for for eSports. So it's one of those things. Once you start being aware of just the whole topic, you'll hear it everywhere. And I do think every day it's growing more and more. So that helps. That's like a nice partnership between the public and the university or college libraries. Exactly. And also now I have I have, for whatever reason, always had sort of a difficult time having a partnership with our local school district. This is the first program I've done that they have now come to me now, but they've seen how successful it is and asked to partner. So it really has made inroads in building those relationships. And with me, at least it's really interesting to go ahead and see colleges looking towards public libraries for recruitment and taking interests in their program development. So this gives another avenue of students or patrons that are homeschooled or not traditionally schooled, that avenue to go ahead and go on for higher education. Now I'll go ahead and turn this on over to Kevin now for the research. Sure. So NACEP, the North American Scholastic eSports Federation was born of a thought experiment. It was underpinned by philanthropy. The owner of the company called Broadcom, Dr. Henry Sam Welley, it's the world's second largest manufacturer of microchips, has a family philanthropy, the Sam Welley Foundation, and one of the large arms of its philanthropy is computer science, STEM learning and education. About four or five years ago, the thought was, is there a way to bring this interest that kids have, this passion for play? Can we use it in such a way that it becomes an attractor, a hook, if you will, for education? So the Sam Welley Foundation, located in California, reached out to the University of California at Irvine, which also is home to one of the winningest college teams in eSports worldwide. They do a fantastic job. We partnered with them and as a part of a grant, did a longitudinal study, something that's still ongoing. So we're in year five of this study. And if we click the slide forward, we'll see that. Go ahead and click them all, Diane, and throw them all up in the screen. I think there's six total. There's a body of work that has gone on for 10 to 15 years. Research scientists whose entire endeavor, I think three more. There we go. Last one, quick it over. There we go. Thank you. Who have done nothing but study how eSports are actually good for kids, good for brain development. And if you just linger with your eyes and look at the orange on the screen, you can see it's not just a case that eSports equals thumb monkeys, as I call them. It's not about learning how to play a game. It is finding applicability for what you learned in a classroom. Or as Tyler said, what you've learned in your community, kids want to be these shout casters, these color commentary artists who can comment on a game or they want to develop their art and graphic art skills and make the logos that go on the t-shirts on the jerseys or wants to create the web pages that get the word out about how good their team is. So they find applicability and that applicability does something in the head. So they're using the scientific reasoning that they learned in their science classes. They are using problem solving skills that they might have picked up in a math class. My middle schoolers were able to take their scores from Super Smash Brothers. So how did Samus do? How did Kirby do? How did Pikachu do? Put them into a matrix and do the math and figure out who was the better squad so that next time we played next week against our friends, we had a better lineup and we could do more damage. We could do better and beat them. So I didn't have to ask the sixth graders to do pre-calculus. They found out that it was good for them and they could get more wins if they would apply what they were learning. So let's go into the next one. So we know that traditional sports teaches us the same kind of value. We've got 70 years of research that goes back and we can point to to be on a sports team, for example, it requires typically a GPA, usually two point or better. In NACEP, it's the same thing as clubs are formed. We ask that all students who are part of that club, not just the players, everybody who wants in maintains a two point or higher. It lets them know that, as we say, the SNNACEP stands for Scholastic, that there are requirements, not that just that you'd be good at a game, that you keep up your end of the bargain and you're also a good student. We know that sports teaches this idea of camaraderie, that you build a community and that community will do things like suffer through a workout and we're going to play football today is really cold. We're playing into fall and into winter and it's snowing. And you know what, that's what we've got to suffer through because we still need to win against Edison High School. So we're going to go out and do this together and we're going to finish the workouts. We have grit. All of these same skill sets and the same kind of soft skill also goes into eSports. Let's go to the next one, please. So here's a blink about what some of this qualitative research is showing us. It's really hard to see the fine print there. It's like a DMVI chart, I know. But if you let your eyes just kind of settle on the colors, blue and green are science and math, respectively. And so every year at the end of our playing season, our researchers reach out to the kids who are playing in our leagues. And we're right now upwards of a thousand clubs across North America, north of about 10,000 kids, almost 11,000 kids who are participating with NACEP and will do random surveys by email or face to face, if you will, in this kind of virtual way, research interviews. And we ask them to share with us how things have changed. And they're telling us that, yes, I can see how what I learned in science class in blue is applicable. I can use what I learned, even more so in math class. I can use the skill sets, the problem solving, these kinds of things to help me with my game play. Even the yellow part is English language arts. A lot of our kids, English is not the first or second language that they speak at home. And instead of, you know, rattling the nerves and having to stand up in front of a class and read a report. And we have to think that I use the right vocabulary. Do I have an accent? Are my friends going to make fun of the way I sound? Did I conjugate correctly? When you're in a club and you're playing a video game, what's important is listening and understanding, following the commands of the shot caller, getting the game thing done, being able to report back and reporting what you see. Nobody's judging you about if you have accent and you sound like this. That's not important. What's important is you understood what I was telling you and we got the win. So kids are emboldened by this. What's really amazing is what you see in that sort of peachy orange and that hot pink is that the social emotional learning quotients. Kids are telling us quite against what we feel as parents and administrators and librarians that, oh, shooters must make shooters out of kids. Don't video games make kids violent? Research is showing us clinically and conclusively that it's quite the opposite as kids play video games as they get together to form communities and work together. They're actually moderating themselves. The chance for them to be toxic, for them to spout out just any kind of hate, for them to pick on other kids and bully, all that goes down because they realize they're part of something bigger, that their skill set is added to the skills of others and it amplifies what we can do together. So they're monitoring themselves. They're more likely to take the coaching and insights of older people, these graybeards here. Suddenly, that old guy actually has something that's going to benefit me and my squad. So I guess I'm going to settle down and I'm going to listen. So research is showing us this. This goes across all socioeconomic types. This goes across all skin tones and race types. This goes across gender. Basically, it's all minds, all kinds. Everybody is benefiting in this tremendous way and we're hugely encouraged by this. Please continue to answer. So here we are, the North American Scholastic Esports Federation. What we do is we promote this idea of bringing clubs to libraries, to schools, to after school organizations, community-based organizations like YMCA's and Boys and Girls Clubs and the Scouts. There are different organizations out here in America, certainly. Ones that want to monetize what it is they do and focus on a very slim this way, very slim sector of the kids, the ones who want to play. We're saying it's much more than that. When we open up a club and Diane and Tyler can attest to this, everybody rushes in. Whether or not you're good at a particular title, that doesn't matter so much as you want to be there as part of what's going on. We propose that there is an ecosystem that exists around this artifice of the player. There are different kinds of work that have to happen so that player can ultimately play a game. You have to be an organizer to be able to make events happen. You've got to be somebody who's creative. Do you even design the game to start with and come up with if it's just the logo, if it's the game itself to be able to code it. You've got to be an entrepreneur to be able to go out there and sit in front of a venture capitalist and get money to be able to fund that game and create it and put it out in the world. Ultimately, you've got to be a strategist. We need to be able to have those players, have a coach and an analyst and be able to direct all that smart so that we can actually have a team and consider winning. So there are kids who join these clubs because they see themselves in some aspect of this ecosystem, not just to play. But they know that I am that artist and I do 3D modeling and I make apps for my phone. And you're telling me this club needs a guy like me to come and do that. Or Sally's done this thing for years and she's been the one to, you know, student body president and she can get kids to do things together as groups. She'd be a great president for this club. Why wouldn't we want her in this? So we lean into this idea. We create clubs in libraries and schools and out of school time places. And this is where we see we bring in a kind of students who don't want or can't play sports, who doesn't seem attached to school in any other way. But this is their in road. This is their jam. This is where they see my people. And now I can begin to experience the fullness of what my community has got to offer. And Diane and Tyler, really quickly, you want to chime in really quickly what your kids are seeing and how they're experiencing at your libraries? Yeah, Kevin, I wanted to say too, as we're talking about NACIF, NACIF provides so many tools at no cost. But I also want libraries to know it's not a prescriptive structure of how you have to design your program. You can use it for inspiration. And because libraries are so different and especially rural libraries, these programs will look different in different libraries. So it's really a way for you to tap into the needs in your community and make this topic work in your library. Excellent. Tyler? Yeah, I'd like to go ahead and echo that as well in that I feel like I'm one of the kings of adapting things to go ahead and meet my circumstance and to meet my community's needs. And that's been one of the amazing things about this eSports programming is that it's empowered my patrons to where I've gone ahead. I've seen the outcomes myself. It's hard to believe, but it's been over two years since I first started doing an eSports program at my library. These young people are working now and I'm getting to go ahead and see how they're becoming more engaged in the community through this sort of programming. I'm also seeing the interest that it's brought within the schools and how the schools are now advocating for student interest driven learning opportunities that just aren't traditional sports. That's it. So believe it or not, you wouldn't know it, but somewhere under cover of night, a state-sized affiliate was formed with NACEP last year. So there is a Nebraska affiliate. There are about a dozen high schools right now that are part of you and they're already gaming. They're part of our community. They participate in the games of the season, but they also do their own things. Diane, you said a great thing there. I love it that we're not prescriptive. NACEP builds a lot of things. We have toolkits, we have curriculum, we have programming and workshops. We do webinar series like this on a host of topics that feed all these different parts of this ecosystem we mentioned, but it's entirely an additive process. We make it like a buffet. We put it out there for you. You don't want the salmon mousse. You don't have to eat it, but know that it's there if you do. Everything is out there for all of you to pick up and take in part or in whole. To adapt, as Tyler said, you can reverse engineer it, open it up and go, this would be great for my patrons, except for the part about the Fortnite. Maybe I want to change the game or I want to do something different with it. We encourage you to do that. That's why we do these things. Let's go to the next slide. Kevin, first, I just wanted to get it. How much does it cost? It's my favorite F word. That sounds crude, but it's free. Everything we do is free. This is funded by philanthropy, the other F word, right, PH word. So this philanthropic trust has been very generous with us. There have been millions of dollars over the last couple of years that have been invested in this. There is a group of people that are funded, myself included, that a grant pays for my position so that I work with our school district, but as part of NAISF to build these programs, to teach teachers and librarians how to use these programs, to become training wheels that step back when you're ready, as we've done with Diane and with Tyler, not even talking about the fact that Tyler has gone through a program called our Scholastic Fellows Program and has hence graduated and become a scholastic mentor. So he's actually now mentoring other teachers and librarians and other folks who are coming into this process that want to take this and drive this in their communities and their states. So again, all of this done for free, all of this for the benefit of you and your patrons, your students. So here's just a blink about what this looks like. So I build middle school and high school curricula. I do things for community-based organizations. That's an actual segment of curriculum that I built. And it's hard to see, but you can see on the right-hand side, it's like a lesson plan. Calculate it out minute by minute. That's a 60 to 90 minute lesson. This is interesting. This is the chocolate broccoli that we bring. How do we get education and eSports together? The minute you say, we're gonna teach you something today, kids. Go, no, it's after school. Why are you doing this to me? But we infuse the learning and we show the applicability how this works in eSports. And there's this, as you see on the left, this beautiful linkage and interdependence from middle school to high school, all the way up into post-secondary, where in the colored box there, you can see we've outlined some colors. We've got next generation science standards, Institute of Science and Technology and education standards, the social-emotional learning standards for the state of California, which are very similar to those of other states, as well as our common core educational standards all baked into this series of units. This is a nine-week program, which can be extended to an 18-week program, a year-long program. I've had teachers do all kinds of interesting things with this, but it reads like stereo instructions. A librarian, a youth leader could pick this up in an hour, understand what has to happen and then execute against that with what you've got at hand and make a great, meaningful hour-long session for kids where they see that what I'm learning leans into, A, my games, but maybe a career potential. Maybe there's a major at one of those colleges, Tyler mentioned, that gives a scholarship and I'm good for that. I think I want to stretch for that. I want to be that kid who gets the scholarship and plays. So know that that kind of curricula is out there available for you. Next one. I'll just mention here while you're talking about that last slide. Yes. How hard to read. This last slide's presentation is going to be available afterwards. Sure. For everyone. So don't worry about not being able to tell that fine print there on that previous slide. I do with the slides that you'll be able so you'll be able to look at them yourself more closely. Thank you. Perfect, Christophe. So again, we talk about the fact that kids come to eSports Club because they want to play games. Whatever the games are of the season or whatever's popular, there's a great game sort of like clue called among us that is being played even among adult circles. This idea that you're on a spaceship and one of you is an imposter. One of you is picking off your crewmates one by one and you better have a good poker face because unless you can lie through your teeth or convince people to the otherwise you get found out. So hugely popular, very fun. Point being that not everybody comes to the club to play. Again, so we've developed what we call the beyond the game challenges. These are challenges they're actually learning that chocolate broccoli covertly teaching kids skills and asking them to do research and analysis and give us something back, a learning objective along these different themes which push against those four different kinds of domains that entrepreneur, the content creative, the organizer and the strategist. Each one of these is a challenge that can be done independently by a club that says this is our fun thing for the month. We're all gonna have this challenge and it's for bragging rights or prizing or swag. NACIF will do these regularly throughout the scholastic year. And what we will do is we will give scholarships to students. They can actually earn money for college that we hold in trust. So when they decide to matriculate, they've got a pot of money that they can use for books, for tuition, for whatever it is they're going to do. So you can see that these things are not just about gaming. Surf's up, design your club's website. So we try to be kitsch with the name, right? So you're web surfing. Let's go, NACIF, something simple. Write a chant for your eSports team but then we're gonna ask you to do something stem with it. We want you to put that into Flipgrid or TikTok and give us a sample of what that looks like. Kids have to produce that and submit that. So we're not just asking for the skill set but we're pushing on other things as well. So there's inherent learning going on. Go ahead, we'll go to the next one. I think we've got one more. So how do we know what's good to play? NACIF does a lot of research. We work with our university partners. We also vet it through our advisory board which is made up of the presidents and provost of several universities here in Southern California. We also work with many major game manufacturers, game developers, and we look at a pallet of 20, 25 games every year, give the pros, give the cons, look at the ESRB, the standard rating for this. I also work extensively with commonsensemedia.org. I will go and discuss with them. This is a parent site where parents will put their honest opinions, what they think and feel about games, about movies, about different things in the world that you cannot buy. This is like a nonpartisan group that will tell what they think and feel about something. So we bring all of that information in, look at a pallet of games and then make a choice, present it to our board and say, here's what kids wanna play, here's what parents and educators are saying about those games, what do we feel good about offering to our constituents all the way out there across the US? And that's how we make the games that we choose. Next slide will be the last one I talk about. This is the very interesting one, I think. Oh, I actually moved it, moved it into clubs. All right, so maybe we can all jump on board and talk about clubs here back and forth. Let's go to the next one. Every club you would imagine has mission, vision, and values, just like you do at your library, just like your school's doing your community. We've got them at NACF as well. We've got five that we start with and they look very much like the mission, vision, and values that you can see painted under the walls of high schools. If you go through, they have pillars of character or they have whatever their values are. Same thing, YMCA has a set of values that they espouse, even faith-based organizations that work with us. We've got churches and synagogues that have got eSports teams and they wanna bake in their particular aspect, their view of life into their mission, vision, values. We have them as well. So everything has this underpinning. It's way down there in that bottom right-hand corner of your screen. Maybe that's the most important one. Every club has a code of conduct that we require of them. So NACF has a few fundamentals and we expect that the club is gonna chip into this as well and help paint it all the way out. But there are some fundamental things that you wanna treat each other as decent human beings, that we have zero tolerance for hate speech, for bullying, for any kind of gender bias where girls can't game, girls aren't shooting me gamers. We don't tolerate those kinds of things. If you have a mad skill for the game, if you have a passion for it, you can certainly come in. Let's go with this one. So these really quickly are the top six concerns. When I go to a school board, when I go to a parent info night, when I talk to a group of educators, whether it's at a conference like PLA or if I am in a professional development setting with teachers, I get hit with these six things all the time. From addiction all the way through to internet safety, to how do you guard my kids against bullying and toxic behavior? And how do we know the games you pick are good? Aren't you playing Grand Theft Auto? Aren't you shooting cops and running cocaine across Miami? Obviously there are games out there in the world that are like that. These are never games you're going to see Nacev support. Do I know kids play them? Certainly they do. But this is why we have a code of conduct and why we write a charter for our clubs to determine who we are and how we're gonna comport ourselves and how we're gonna take care of ourselves. So while there are absolutely concerns out there in the world and we don't shy away from them, we know that the club is generally the remedy for most of these ills. We do work with school IT departments to make sure that internet access is appropriate. We use, for example, for communications, a server called Discord. It's a chat channel platform that is very common in the gaming world, but we also work with other platforms. A school or a library can use WhatsApp or Google Meets or whatever it needs for its community to feel safe, that only those who are in our group, our club, are being addressed on this platform so that the weird world doesn't get in and affect kids. What about violence? The idea that when we have clubs, they might work three days a week, one day for practice, one day for scrimmage, but the other days of the week are club activities. We don't actually play at all. We do other activities, and Tyler and Diane are gonna talk about this next, that are equally engaging, equally fun, but have nothing to do directly with games, and that satisfies the kids. So how do you know you're ready? Go ahead, next one. Oh, I love this part. Oh, right? Yeah, it's up to me now. So when I started at the Cherokee Public Library, I started as the Youth and Special Services Librarian, but you know what? I had never really worked with youth before. I was like a college librarian. I was an academic librarian. I was used to handling, you know, like faculty having meltdowns because they couldn't get access to this journal article or something like that. So I came in thinking that I knew what kids wanted, because you know what? I figured, you know what? Kids like food. So you know what? One of my first attempts, one of my first fails, that's a first attempt in learning for programming was pancake art. Do you see that unicorn pancake there in the bottom left? That was... Oh, that's what that is. Yeah, kind of looks like a free Minecrafty. Ain't that? I had the edible glitter and everything that I was happy with. You know what? The kids weren't too interested in that. And you know what? Looking back, syrup in the library was not a good idea. And then we also had a Scarecrow murder mystery where it was one of the staff members. I figured, you know what? Deans are in all this true crime stuff and everything right now. It's gonna be good. You know what I had? A sad moldy pumpkin out front of the library. It's another one that just did not work. So going forward, the Cherokee Public Library was selected for an IMLS grant a few years ago called Future Ready with the Library. The goal for that grant was to go ahead and figure out what middle school students needed for college and career readiness. So working with the youth in my community and the businesses in my community, the library figured that the answer was soft skills among a few other things. There were a couple of businesses or like kids can't count change back. And it's just like, and that's an issue. And it's just like, is it really though? But we also went ahead and worked with technology as well since they were some older, most of the businesses had older technology. So what we went ahead and worked through was identifying kind of fostering those soft skills. So communication, introspection, you know, all of that jazz to where we went ahead and we had activities on all of that. One of my favorites and the one that just resonated with me was we made resumes for our favorite video game characters. And it was so transformative. So we went ahead and we picked out our favorite video game character and then several games that they were in. And then through there, we identified skills that they would go ahead and need to go ahead and complete or go through that video game. So at the end, we kind of wrapped all up and there were so many light bulbs going off where kids were realizing they had a lot in common, something resonated with their favorite video game character. They were seeing a lot of things they had in common. It was just absolutely transformative for me and it was just the highlight of my program with soft skills in eSports. And you know what? Like we taught communication with blindfolded Mario Kart and this still drummed to that. Yeah, blindfolded Mario Kart was glorious in its own self. Next slide, please, Diane. I wonder if I do better at driving games if I did it that way, because that's not one of my best. But you know what? One of those things we also talk about are how many different ways STEM can go ahead and be implemented. I too learned from Kevin and I was teaching my kids calculus for Super Smash Brothers. Every kid wants to learn how to play video games better. They want to learn and make and do things from their favorite games and characters to where you can go really heavily lean into that. We used Thingiverse to go ahead or in TinkerCAD to go ahead and look at models for our 3D printer and get printing. We went ahead and teamed up for it to do some VR stuff. We did hour of code activities last year all based or kind of based in the eSports environment and world and it was just really transformative. Next slide, please. And one of the other really interesting things is that if you just want to go ahead and get your feet wet, you have streamers, you have gamers in your community, partner with them to go ahead and do a community game night. That's one of the, one thing that I go ahead and do every other Friday night with other educators. So there's a very talented man, J.D. Williams, who is in Arizona and then Angelica Gianna, she's actually in California. My patrons can go ahead and play. We do a Fortnite Friday night. It's one of the things where the teens were already really wanting that. And we have a safe, inclusive environment where we can go ahead and play in a private lobby. So we can go ahead and play that game altogether. And there's some nights where we go ahead, we have over 100 people signed up to go ahead and play Fortnite across the U.S., which is really cool. So you can go ahead and stream and grow your program. However you want to go ahead and do any direction you can go ahead and imagine, you can make it possible. I didn't mean to rush you there, Tyler. Tyler, the best outcome of the future ready with the library grant to me was us meeting. Because Tyler and I were both in it and separately, not knowing each other, we both started working towards eSports programming. And I wanna say that although Kevin flatters me and calls me a gamer because I play a block puzzle, I do not consider myself a gamer. And that is to say, you can have a program even if you don't know a lot about gaming. Because like Tyler said, there are teens in your community who know a lot about gaming. So they can fill that in for you. I also was fortunate enough to get a, it was a $50,000 IMLS grant to launch an eSports program and based on connected learning and digital literacy and providing internet to people in the community because this is my soapbox in rural community. A lot of people don't have decent internet connections at home. And Kevin said once and it really hit home with me that gaming skills are social currency. And so if you are a teen and you don't have access to the internet and can't speak this language, then you are missing out some opportunities to have discussions with other people. And then a lot of towns libraries have the fastest internet connection in town. And so we did get a grant but there are absolutely ways that you can make this happen with a gaming system. And even if the library doesn't have a gaming system the kids do and they could bring it to the library. So just kind of give you a picture of how we kicked off our program. First of all, I went and visited a leadership or student council meeting at the school, asked them if they would be interested in an eSports program and they were all in. So for our kickoff, we decided to have a tournament, a Smash Brothers tournament. And I don't know about you but our local media is always looking for content. And so through the school, one of the teachers was managing sort of my liaison, having kids sign up for the tournament. We have 400 kids in our high school, 55 signed up for this tournament, which is just unheard of. I have had so many programs where I thought it was neat, even better than a unicorn pancake art, I've done things that I thought was great and nobody showed up, this has been different. Kids get this, they show up. And so come to find out, I went on Facebook and there's a group called Texoma, which is our area of nerds. And on the right hand picture, the guy standing in the front is a game developer. And so he agreed to handle this tournament for me. And so we had 55 kids come, but on top of that, the TV station came a couple of days in advance and unbeknownst to me at the end of their story, they said, hey, and the public is invited and welcome to attend. And I was horrified because I knew we were packed. But we did get some families come with tweens and that's been one of my learnings that we started this for high school students and there is a whole lot of interest in those younger kids, the tweens. So we have started programming for them as well. The upper left picture you can see there, that's the man with the beard is the coach of the local college esports team and then sitting next to him is one of his players. She's an Overwatch player and became a coach and a mentor for our team. And that has been just a huge benefit because a lot of our kids, if they go to college, will be the first kid in the family to go to college. So she is able to mentor them and just be a friend to them, an example of college. And so that's been outside, above and beyond the esports itself. So that's another one of our coaches, Electra. And this was just, we were getting ready for tryouts on this day. We do have gaming computers and we have become a teen boy hangout, which for libraries, a lot of time, that is a hard demographic to reach. That's a huge deal. That's awesome, Dan. Yeah, yeah. So, and even again, beyond the esports itself this year, it happens that we've got a lot of kids who are doing half day at school. So they come here after their half day. So they're getting here about one o'clock and the library manager has really become friends with them. They sit down with her and they bring their lunch and they sit and have lunch and she just talks to them about their day. So it has built these connections. We know what they're doing in school. We go to their theater performances. But as Kevin mentioned, a lot of our kids also, this is the only extracurricular they have. They don't participate in any other extracurriculars, no kind of group things. And I love our team. There has not been any sort of clickishness or kids from all different classes and sort of social status within the school are very friendly and supportive of one another. And then they've also gone on with those tweens to be supportive of those kids as they're learning. So I do wanna say, be aware, our library is basically one big room. So this is something that we deal with is we were never a quiet library before. But the original plan was the gamers would be here on a day we were closed to the public so they could be as loud and as enthusiastic as they wanted. And they now come in every day to practice after school. And so they're very enthusiastic. So we're definitely a no shushing library. It gets loud in here. And for us, what that is about is setting expectations with others in our library space that we are not the place to go to if you need a quiet study space. And if that's what you need, try to come before the gamers are in. So one of the things that's important to me as a library director is getting publicity because publicity seems to bring opportunities to us. One of the, first of all, city council likes it. I'm assuming positive publicity. So city council likes it. And then when I am grant writing, which I do a lot of, this goes a long way to making the case. And so once COVID started, we were looking for some ways to not have people gathered inside. And we thought about drive-in gaming. People do drive-in movies. What if we did drive-in gaming? So we turned to trailers sideways, set a projector up outside, and did a Mario Kart tournament. And people... That's awesome. Yeah, it was so much fun. People drove up in their cars and we asked them they could even bring their own controllers or the library manager and I were disinfecting controllers and four would race at a time and we would take the disinfected controller to their car. And we got some really good stories out of that. Like kids who are not driving yet, the parents were sitting in the car with the kids, getting to observe this thing that they had never really taken the time to look at before. And they might be sitting there just talking with the kids for 30 minutes waiting for their turn. And so it was a bonding experience. And publicity-wise, this is the thing that we've done that has gotten worldwide attention. We, Finland, Ireland, Australia, this drive-in gaming was covered on the news all around the world. So our city council, when it comes to budget time, this is one of the things that I talk about that the reputation this library brings to our little small town. And it's been, our eSports been written up in a number of library journals and it's just digital literacy for these kids in a rural community. How are they ever going to be on a level playing field with their peers from the suburbs and larger cities who are used to technology? This is a gift that we can give them. And so also, Kevin mentioned, and I don't know that we've emphasized this enough, it's not just the players. There is a whole ecosystem around this. So we do have books to check out, games to check out. You could check out controllers to let people experiment with those. So being the creative librarians, we are, there are a lot of different directions to go in. And because this is growing so rapidly and growing in libraries, I am really looking forward to learning how other libraries take this to a whole new creative level that I've never dreamed of. So that is our presentation. We're right up against the hour, but Krista, I believe you said you would monitor if there were questions. Yes. Let's see, if anybody does have any questions, yeah, type them into the questions section. Nobody typed anything in while you were talking, but that's okay, they're listening. Okay. If anybody does have any questions or thoughts or ideas about things, or if you've done gaming tournaments or EESports in your library, type them in, please do. I'll just say, I think this is, as I said at the beginning, this is something that's personally near and dear to me, of course, because I do it myself the evening and watching the tournaments online and TV, but I think it's great that this is out there in the libraries. And I find it still sad that there's still too many people that have those misconceptions about gaming, like what you had up there, Kevin, about the violence that it, and what about this chat and being safe and that there's been so much studies and just anecdotal that, no, it doesn't happen that way. And that kids and teens in their libraries, not just in these gaming events, but lots of libraries trying to do more children and teen-based programming have learned, they self-police themselves so much that they do not tolerate, even if sometimes you don't forcefully institute the code of contact. I mean, you always have a code of contact, but even beyond that, they will call people out on, no, you don't do that. We don't act that way. They do not want to lose their library or their access to it and what they're doing in all the different programming and it totally carries over into the video gaming. That's it. It carries over into their lives. This is the thing. If you want good digital citizens, you've got to start growing them early. So you grab them when they're tweens, you teach them that this is the right way. Again, that code of conduct, talking about how they want to comport themselves, how they want to treat each other. It's the golden rule, treat others the way you want to be treated. Treat others the way you know you would like to be treated. And then take care of each other. As you say, it's a privilege to be able to have a lot of these things. If it wasn't for a patron interest, the library would not create these kinds of programs. So it's in their best interest to take care of each other so that more of these things can happen. So see this again, in a thousand clubs across North America, they can't be wrong. Somebody has crossed the ice before any of us. Somebody was that pioneer. Nobody has drowned crossing that frozen lake. Everybody's come out okay. And we teach each other as we said. So here's Diane and Tyler teaching all of you. This actually works. It's good for kids. It's not all on them. They have the support of those teams and tweens. Diane said, you haven't got to be a game of yourself. Good if you are, because that's immediate social credit. Oh, she's cool. He's cool. He's got that. Even if you don't, kids want to, I'll use the term flex for you. They want to show you that they've got these smarts and you are giving them an opportunity to demonstrate what they can do by saying, don't think about tournaments. If you guys can put up a bracket, I'll give you a Saturday and we'll make this happen. They run for those opportunities. They love these opportunities. Yeah. I don't have a question. You're talking about the gaming, the sub-organizations, like we have one in Nebraska and in other states, the clubs and everything that do the tournaments there. Is there ever any, like, do the tournaments just happen within that one school or school district or the state or do they compete with other, outside of that like Nebraska go against Iowa or something? Big answer is yes. It can be all of those things. NACF puts it up so you can do, again, it's a federated model. So every club is its own unique little entity. You all kind of roll up to NACF. If you choose to align with the Nebraska State affiliate, you may. And they may have tournaments and games and segments that you want to join up to, but you don't have to. It's what you want to do. If your constituents, your patrons say, oh, I totally want to be part of the regional. And then I want to go for a state championship. You may. And then they having risen up a state champion, they go up against the rest of NACF. They're playing for North American bragging rights. So it can go as far flung as you want to. Next year, NACF is becoming worldwide Scholastic Esports Foundation. We're growing, we're officially making it global. We have seven international partners globally that we work with. Well, now we're going to take this one step bigger. So kids in Nebraska can be scrumming with kids in Japan and Singapore and Israel and South Africa next year. This is all coming to bear. Go ahead Tyler. One of the things is that we're seeing middle school tournaments for Rocket League. Yes you are. Between schools in New Mexico and England and in Canada. It's everything's just going international and it's happening so quick. And it's just so enriching to go ahead and see that my kids can play among us with kids all across the US. They can play Fortnite with kids around the world. And that's what we were talking a lot about high schools and but younger and younger kids are getting into this. Whether you know what or want it to happen or not. And I'm glad that we can get them into it to be talking to other kids in their age and be doing it, I don't say in a controlled environment but a guided environment. Monitor, yes, moderated, exactly. I was going to say one of the best, safest formats we have is Minecraft. We do so much in Minecraft. We did a COVID challenge earlier in the year to sort of take on the issue of the pandemic. Many kids not knowing what's going on, very frightened about what could be happening. So we thought let's make an educational moment out of this. So we had challenges where kids built like the perfectly safe COVID home. If you have to hunker down, you've got to be there for two weeks, build your dream home in Minecraft. What would that look like? Indoor swimming pool, the size of a lake, okay. Whatever you want, helicopter pad for when you need to go to the store, okay. Put it together. So there are challenges we do with that. We had international attendance. We had Mexico put up 3,000 kids in 10 days when we heard that. So you're able to compete in that forum and it's Minecraft, almost every teen in between knows Minecraft. So yeah. And we have a comment, yeah, that some of you say the educational side of Minecraft, does promote itself as education too. So, you know, someone to look for that out there as well, Minecraft and education. They have their whole program of doing that in schools, yep. Yeah, if you have Microsoft for education on your Chromebooks and your community, you've already got Minecraft a license. It's already part of that. So your kids can start playing that now for free. Yeah. They're doing it at home anyways, probably bring it into the school and make that connection with them. And yeah. That's it. That's awesome, all right. Because I looked up here, I'm gonna actually bring back presenter control to my screen so I wanted to show everyone that I did. One, there we go. This is the page for that. But I just searched to see what was going on with Nebraska. And first things come up is the Nebraska page within your NASA website. And then also look here at McCook High School for those of you who are in Nebraska. Our sessions, of course. But then there's another one farther down here, Amherst, Nebraska. So, and then this is the page for the Nebraska one on there. They've got Facebook, Twitter, their own websites. So... How many schools, see? Actually, these are all the locations. But if you look on the main page here, this is all the school's logos up the top here. There you go. As the kids say, you all are a thing. It exists. Here's all the different schools that are doing it, yeah. And some of these that are our littlest towns and some in our larger towns. So it's all over. Some of these are from, yeah. This keeps going, yeah, we have a lot. Nate Simmons is in charge of that affiliate. He's also a graduated scholastic fellow. So you've got somebody that is steeped in NASA but understands the needs of Nebraska. So you're in good hands. And here, Walt Hill, that's the city that's on our Native American, Walt Hill Reservation there too. So yeah, this is awesome. Yeah, I just did it, I just wondered, ooh, Nebraska, so look for your state if you're not in Nebraska and see what they've got going. That's it. I think, I'm chatting with the last one this week. Wyoming completes my bingo card. I will have all 50 states completed once we deal with Wyoming, but they're also very excited. Again, it starts in middle schools but the fact that they now know that this exists in libraries and other public spaces, they're so excited. They're like, where have you been? And I've been saying the same thing to them. Where have you all been? You're the last state to get to us. So, but this is good. We welcome everybody. Yeah, all right. So it is a little after 11, but we did start a little after 10. So that's okay. Anybody have any last minute desperate questions or comments they want in the audience there? Type it in the question section. And we can get those answered. Otherwise, we will have the slides and everything. You can always reach out to Kevin, Diane, or Tyler with any questions you do have later as you're doing it. Absolutely. Yeah. Any last words from you guys before I wrap up for today? Krista, I just wanted to thank you through the years I have attended many, many of these that are been offered through Nebraska. So I appreciate the work you're doing. Thank you so much. That's one of the great things about our show here. When things did start locking down in March due to the pandemic kind of didn't affect this particular part of my job much. It's a webinar. It's online all the time. The only thing that we did differently is here locally we would sometimes have presenters come here into our offices to be on the show with us and just everybody went remote. So I said, we'll keep going. As long as people have things to talk about we will keep doing the show. I think we should take one week off a year for our state annual conference. We didn't have the conference but took a week off in October anyways but we are still going strong and we will keep going. Yeah. Thank you so much Diane. Good. It doesn't look anybody has any other questions. So I think we will wrap it up today. Thank you everyone for attending. Thank you Kevin and Tyler and Diane for being here. This is great. Lots of awesome resources and information and the recording and the slides will be available for everybody to look at afterwards. So you can start doing one of these in your school if you don't aren't already. Our archives go here on our Encompass Live main webpage. Right underneath our upcoming shows is our archives. Most recent ones will be top of the page so today's will be here. Should be up and posted before the end of this week as long as go to webinar and YouTube and everybody cooperates with me. When it is posted I'll email everyone to let you know who everyone who reached register for today or attended today let you know that it's available and then we'll push it out on our social media or social media places. We do have a Facebook page where we post reminders of shows and when our recordings are going up. We also use the Encompass Live hashtag on other things like on Twitter and Instagram, et cetera. So take a look there as well for when we're posting things. Our archives here, you can search for our previous shows too. This is our full archives going back to the beginning of Encompass Live which the first show was in January, 2009. So we have over 10 years worth of recordings here. So do look back at our previous shows. Just do pay attention when you are looking something up to the original broadcast date. Many topics will stand the test of time but some might not. So just pay attention when something was broadcast. Websites might have changed, links might not work, services or products may have changed drastically or no longer exist. You'll pay attention when you are looking at our archives here. So I also wanna mention Diane who is here with us today has been a presenter with me previously, back in 2016 on our Big Talk from Small Libraries. This is our annual conference for small libraries. So the FTA or population served of 10,000 or less. We are doing it again at the end of February. It's always last Friday in February and the call for speakers is now open. So if you are interested in presenting, if you are from a smaller rural library, get your proposal and proposals are open until January and we will have our Big Talk from Small Libraries conference at the end of February. I think that, yeah, other than that, that wraps up for today's show. Hope you join us on our future shows. Next week we will talking again about teens leading teen volunteers to professional development in teen agency. Amber Loveless who's from the Queens Public Library in New York City will be on with us to talk about how she got her teens to do that with the library and updates about what they've been doing, how they've had to adjust some of this due to COVID as everyone has had to. But, and that wraps up. Thank you everybody for being here with us this morning. Thank you for having us. Yeah, and have a good day. Be smart, be safe, and hopefully we'll see you on a future episode of Encompass Live. Bye bye. Thanks everyone.