 Welcome to the wide world of eSports, a show devoted to all things eSports. I'm your host, Catherine Norr. Today, in this Back to School episode, we're talking with Danielle Johnson, the executive director of Texas Scholastic eSports Federation. Our topic is Scholastic eSports, the path to college and career readiness. Welcome, Danielle. Hi. Thank you for having me. Okay, so let's just start with the question. I didn't know this until recently, but what is Scholastic eSports? Well, just like Scholastic athletics, it is the competition brought into the schools. So for traditional sports, football, basketball, softball, volleyball, baseball, we have Scholastic versions of those, and that's what happens in our middle school and high schools, and eSports is the same. We want to bring that level of competition and that level of community and that level of connectedness from our gamers and have that in schools. And so the students have a place to play, a place to showcase their skills, a place to connect with other kids and their schools and their teachers, and also a way to further their future interests, whether that be college, career or military. Are you a teacher? I am. I teach sixth grade technology at a school in Dallas, Texas. And so what, how did you get involved in eSports? Like all teachers, accidentally. That's pretty much par for the course about how we get involved with things. It's because our students want it or need it. And occasionally we do things we have no business doing because our students want it. And tech stuff was one of those things. I was at an education conference where I heard an expert in the field say that we should have different leagues for girls and for boys because girls, so that way girls don't get harassed. And that made me incredibly angry. So I was like, wow, that is not something I will ever let my son be a part of. And realized I was in a position to make change. So I rounded up a few dozen or so teachers from around the state of Texas. You know, we all met on the internet, Discord, Twitter, wherever. And we just started this thing. So we have a free league for schools to sign up for and to play. And not only does tech stuff do this, but actually 15 other states have teacher run nonprofit leagues for their state. Okay. So what is Texas Scholastic eSports Federation? So like a federation, we're not an overseeing body. We don't rule over anybody or dictate anything. We are a community of teachers who believe that eSports can be a path to college and career readiness for all Texas kids. And, you know, honestly, for all kids in the United States, but we are focused specifically on Texas. But like I said, there's 15 other states that have teacher run nonprofit leagues. Hey, I understand Texas has a few school districts. Tell me about that. So Texas has very local control for education. In fact, we have 1,028 school districts in Texas. And that makes there's about 3000 high schools and about 3000 middle schools. So about 6000 secondary schools. We don't have all 6000 participation yet, obviously. But we want each school district to know that this is an option available. If they want to have these programs in the schools will help set them up and help support them will lead professional development will run the league. We provide prizes for kids. We provide like actual coaching for kids. So we have run some academies to help kids level up their skills. We also do a college fair and a couple of college recruiting events. Along with having our production teams be entirely students. So our our producer, the stream producers and the shout casters are all high school students. Oh, that's terrific. So why do you think esports is important to for schools? So it's not just the gaming and the gaming is a big part of it. That's kind of where we catch kids. I call it hiding the broccoli. And that's where we get kids involved. But the skills surrounding esports are so much broader because a student may main in one game. And even at the pro level, their career is very short. But the ancillary parts of being on an esports team, if it's not your your title season, you are shout casting, you are the twitch moderator, you're doing social media or doing clips. And so you do learn a broad range of skills, especially the media for esports without the production team, you don't have an audience. So nobody is watching you play without the production team. There's not a football stadium or a baseball stadium you can go to and watch. So the production and the media around it is an essential part of every single team. And that is an area that our kids are excellent in. They they know how to communicate digitally. They're fantastic at it. And so it gives them a role opportunity to shine and showcase and to build some of these skills. So what makes for career readiness and college readiness when you're talking about having esports at the scholastic level? For college and career readiness, some of our students actually are in that career part already. We actually have seniors at the high school in my school district that work for professional organizations because there is such a lack of knowledge and skill in a lot of the areas of esports, especially some, you know, some smaller market that companies hire high schoolers and train them. So things that students need to be able to do is communicate on camera. They need to be able to talk about the game. They need to be able to set up a run of show. They need to be able to organize tournaments by promoting them, creating graphics, doing registration, doing the brackets. And then there's the rest of the production. How do you pull in, you know, a bunch of different streams? How do you go from camera angle to camera angle? Pulling in whether you're using vmix or zoom or discord or stream yard, you know, those are all really the platforms that get used. We're trying to get the kids to use vmix because that's the professional standard. And so that way they can transition super easily to an after school job in college or, you know, working for us or another esports organization right now. Sure. And the kids are native to this technology. So it's probably a lot easier. Is that right? Yeah. It is and it isn't. Because the kids are so adept at what they want to do and not necessarily what is needed. And getting them to take a bigger step back from just their view and their lane that they are in on their own and ask them to take a step back and be like, okay, how do you organize several people doing this? How do you set up a media content calendar? How do you make sure that you are going back and reiterating the things that a caster needs to do, you know, restating the name of the game, who's playing, the date, you know, the current score? One of the biggest skills is picking out the story and being able to tell a story, you know, mid game and seeing as things evolve. Okay, I'm going to focus on that. Storytelling is a major aspect of that college and career readiness. But our biggest thing that we're doing right now is just giving kids as many opportunities as they can, as many at-bath as they can get so that they can they can practice because everybody's going to suck the first time. So let's get that first that first failure over with and start growing. So tell us about the classes you teach and, you know, kind of about the topics that are important in in your curriculum. With I teach technology and design, so it's middle school level. But we definitely focus and work on our digital communication skills, what is proper, you know, social conversation versus a more formal business conversation level. We talk about writing and, you know, verbal communication. We also do video editing, sound editing and those type of things along with a lot of storytelling elements to generalize these things. And these aren't specific to eSports. These are industry, every industry type skills. And that is one thing we always want parents and teachers and school administrators to see is they recognize these skills. They just don't recognize them when they're watching just the kid playing because behind the screen and behind the console are kids running the show. They're kids, you know, organizing other students and telling us what to do sometimes. And they're the ones, you know, hammering out some of our rules and norms that we haven't settled on yet. We have really great digital debates in our Discord server between teams about was the sportsman like, was it not? And where the kid's land becomes our rules. And so this is such a fun thing to do because we get to build it with the students. But these are also things these students can apply to college and be like, I helped build the Texas Scholastic eSports Federation. And like, I shout casted the state championship for Rocket League. All of those things are activities that students can put on college resumes and really like broaden what we consider an extracurricular activity. Okay, so now you did mention the word parent. Okay. So tell me about how the parents feel about this or how they express their feelings and kind of the range of parental thoughts that you hear. So my stepdaughter is a theater major. And so I'm sure that that conversation, like you can just picture how that went the first time. Yeah, I'm going to major in theater. Okay, so how are you going to make money? But it turns out stage management is a really universal skill. And once we started seeing all of these other things that were part of her theater curriculum, we're like, oh, I recognize those skills. Those are things we use all the time. And I've even had my stepdaughter help us as a virtual stage manager for events because who knew that was a thing, right? But it's really the same thing. The first time a kid tells his parents, oh, I'm going to go play video games in college, mom and dad are like, that's not a thing. But it is a thing. And when we did our college fair in April, one of our focuses, it was more than games. So we wanted to focus on everything that was not the player position. And we did, we were able to show parents a behind the scenes look at a match and all the shout casting and production that goes into it. We were able to have tons of different guests talk about their role in different industries, whether that be the ancillary technology, whether that be coaching, whether that be casting, production, graphic design, social media content, all of those parts are such an vital thing to a team, to the whole organization of a team that the players are part of it. But also we're all of these other jobs. And these are skills that really not that many people have, which is why organizations hire high schoolers. Sure. So do you ever have parents who have very strict rules about screen time and that that interferes with their ability to engage in your particular class? We do. And occasionally we'll have parents that are like, my kids are not allowed to play games. And that happens. But as far as an extracurricular activity, we can't make everybody happy. I guess this is the bottom line. Really can't in education. Somebody's always not going to like what you're doing. And really, if you're not getting pushback, you're not doing anything. So that's that's kind of our approach for it. We do try to make sure our games, we only run a couple of titles at a time. We make sure that they are rated appropriately that they're typically free to play games, that they're cross platform games, trying to make sure that we are able to include as many kids as possible. We generally have something for everybody, even if a parent is saying, no, I don't want my kid playing against and maybe communicating with other kids. I don't know. We have asynchronous Minecraft competitions. So the builds are done outside of school time on your schedule and then you submit videos. So we have lots of lots of other things. We also are going to be having some chess tournaments. So, you know, adopting that into the esports world. So there is something for everybody. And in this pandemic world, where traveling and going different places is kind of difficult. The esports is there and it's great because the kids can connect from home. They can connect from school. You don't have to travel to play games like you do for traditional sport. And the kids get to connect with each other, which is kind of the point. What other games are they playing at your school? So we are running Rocket League and Smite because both of those are free-to-play cross-platform games. And then, like I said, we do Minecraft and chess and those are going to be our fall games. In the spring, we'll run Overwatch, which isn't free, but we get the licenses granted to the schools. And I don't know what our next spring major will be. Pokemon Unite is kind of a front-runner at the moment because it's free-to-play. It's going to be on mobile this month. So that is some, and with 10-minute matches, which is fantastic. And so that's probably going to be something we run. But one of the best things about being a state organization is we can custom tailor whatever the teachers need. So when Texas power grid shut down in February of last year, I know it doesn't get that cold in Hawaii, but it got very cold in Texas. We didn't have anybody forfeit because we just canceled the matches that week. We knew nobody could play. So just being within our state means that we have a little, it's more local control. We can pivot and do things and structure things in a way that meets the needs of Texas schools. What about economic ability to have fast internet or have computers at home? Have you seen challenges with that in Texas? Absolutely, we have. And that's one of the reasons we want these programs to be in schools. In a lot of areas of our state, the school has the fastest internet because they have the money to put into the infrastructure. So students may not have a $1,000 gaming PC at home. They might not have a PlayStation, but at school, they can have it. And if every school can have it, then it's equal for all kids. So that's what we're really trying to push for is having these programs be school sponsored, school sanctioned. The teacher has a stipend for the extracurricular activity, the equipments on campus, so that every kid has the same equal opportunity, as every other student, regardless of socioeconomic status. Do you think that Texas is ahead of other states in having scholastic e-sports programs, or how does it fall within other states? I wish. We're one of the newer states to really get on board with this. But there are states like New Jersey and Wisconsin and Ohio and Illinois that have been doing this for years and have had high school and middle school programs for years. And so, luckily, educators, we like each other. And so we share. Texas has been able to grow and build our program really fast because we stand on the shoulders of those who came before. And the work that the educators in New Jersey and Iowa and Illinois, and Ohio and Wisconsin have put in have paved the path for us and have paved the path for other states that want to build their own organizations. And if a school hasn't really built their scholastic e-sports organizations, do you have some advice for them to get it going? You find your people both inside of the education, the deosphere and outside. There are a huge number of educators that want to bring this to schools. And so they're, like I said, later today, we have our e-sports EDU podcast and stream at 730. And that's one way. If you're curious, you can hang out and join us on stream, ask questions. There's e-sports EDU Discord server. And then there are other people. There are other teachers that want to do this, too. There's other teachers that don't want to charge for free to play games. There are other teachers that would love to build this organization. And that is one of the craziest things I've found is we haven't been told no yet. So not just other educators want to join and be part because they want to have a stay in how these things run. But the e-sports business community is so open to helping schools. One of the things I, or analogies I use is when I was growing up, mid-90s, early 90s, every school had the Apple too. Every school, that was what you worked on, was an Apple. Because Apple invested heavily in technology in schools at that time period. And what's the most valuable company in the world? Apple. Investing in schools pays dividends. And it might not be immediate, but there is an economic return. Teachers have a captive audience. I mean, building brand loyalty from age 11 is like the gold standard in marketing. So that's literally what we have the opportunity to do. And we are, we try to use this judicially, this power we have, right? But there is real economic incentive to investing in these programs by the business community. So I understand you are, that diversity and inclusion are important to you in what you do. Can you tell us about that? So the esports and gaming industry right now is very white and very male. And that is not how our entire country looks. That is definitely not what Texas looks like. Texas is a plurality. No ethnic group makes up a majority of people. We are a bilingual state. Most of the students in Texas go to a Title I school. That means there's more than a certain percentage of students on free and reduced lunch. And esports and gaming don't currently reflect that. And by having these programs in schools, in the next five years, we can change what an entire industry looks like and who is represented. I know Epic Games does a great job of making sure that they have a diverse representation in their avatars. And Epic listens to teachers. So Epic will listen to us. Epic works with educators to help bring Fortnite and Unreal Engine to schools. And they hear the community and they listen. And so they do have diverse representation in their avatars and in their games. You can always find an awesome, strong female to play, which wasn't always available. And the more that we have students involved in these programs in school, the more the industry changes in a very short amount of time. So I understand that in the top esports athletes who are earning the big bucks, that you have to go really far down the list to find any women on that list. What do you think about that? And how can that change? Just like traditional sport, it didn't change overnight to have women in high-level positions having NFL and NBA coaches that are women is just now a thing. Whereas Title IX, that wasn't last year. But changing the landscape and the look of traditional sports started in schools with including more girls programs, specifically recruiting girls and maintaining girls in programs. And that's really what we want to do is we want to recruit and maintain girls in playing positions and in other positions. But as we do that, we know that the safe will be the space will become safer for girls and for underrepresented populations. And that will change what the industry looks like. So the landscape in traditional sports was changed by having these programs in middle schools and high schools. And the landscape of these sports will be changed the same way by having these programs in middle schools and high schools. And I would think that if people grow up in an environment like in middle school and high school, where half the people participating are girls, that that would become the norm for them. And that no longer this idea of the white male dominating. That would change, I would think. That's our hope. We're really looking forward to doing some academic research. So as educators, we get nowhere without peer reviewed research. And so TechSeph specifically is about to launch our very first, like we have our publication picked out, we have the Methodologist, we have, you know, the survey is being validated. But we are really looking forward to doing some real academic research and to making sure that we are following the data and pulling girls in and pulling in students in color and other underrepresented groups and making sure that they are in the programs and they stay in the programs and we are tracking that, you know, just to make sure we're doing it right. We want the sport, the landscape to change. We want that toxicity and that masculinity to change. And we also don't want a situation where because there are so good girls, women are competing against each other. And for that one token female spot, like that's what we don't want. We want it to look like our schools and look like our kids and look like the country, look like our state, which is half women. Sure. And, you know, it occurs to me that I really don't know that I've ever even heard a female shoutcaster. You know, are there girls that are getting into that? Oh, absolutely. And it's fun too, because you don't have to be the best at the game if you can be entertaining. And that is something where a lot of people are, they have some skills at being entertaining and communicative and, you know, expressive. So I would say about half our shoutcasters in tech stuff have been female. We really do try to showcase that as much as we can. But it just it occurs naturally because we do have a pretty decent female representation. It's not half by any stretch, but the girls that are in it, they like it and they feel safe and they feel comfortable. And they don't have to have a male avatar and never use voice chat. They get to be girls and be treated with respect and with, you know, maturity and appreciation and all of those things that we want for kids, you know, just to feel accepted. Sure. And how has pandemic impacted what you do? It's sped it up. So you would think that the pandemic would make things harder, but it didn't. So tech stuff started like we had our first big announcement in February of 2020, right? So like a month later, we're like, oh, my God, the NBA is closing. Oh, my God, there's no more school. And what we realized was kids can do this from home. It's not like they have to go to practice and be around each other physically there. We don't have to get equipment or locker rooms. So we actually started running tournaments in April of 2020, several months before we previously planned on. And it's been great for sixth grade, especially this is how kids made friends last year because they're coming from a ton of different elementary schools to one new school, half of them are at home still. And eSports is how they met each other. That's how they made friends and connected. So when they were back on campus, they were like, I know you. So that's been really great. The pandemic has really made it important for kids to stay connected to school and to each other. And eSports has made that possible in a way that very few other things have. So I'll give you the last word. So how can people reach out to you to find out more? You are welcome to come to our website. That's T-E-X for Texas. S-E-F, Galastic eSports Federation, S-E-F.org. You can find me on Twitter at iHeartMissJohnson. And you can also follow our Twitch channel, which is TexF1. Terrific. Well, Danielle, thank you so much for being on the wide world of eSports today. And thank you to our viewers for joining us today. Next week, my guest will be Randall Fujimoto of Game Train Learning. See you then.