 to the wide world of eSports, a show devoted to all things eSports. I'm your host, Catherine Norr. Today we're talking with the director of eSports at Augment Ed, Jennifer Yichen, about education and eSports. Welcome, Jennifer. Hi, how are you? Hi, everybody. All right, it's great to have you here. What's Augment Ed? So Augment Ed is a startup company that started about a year ago with investment from Helix eSports. Helix eSports is the largest land center in the United States, I believe. But for Augment Ed specifically, our mission was strictly education, but we needed a way to get into schools on a level that they would kind of understand and be excited about. So that's kind of where the eSports branch came from. So with Augment Ed and the eSports branch of that, we're trying to incorporate gamification into learning in general and really lean into the strengths of an individual. So with our courses, they range over a few different products. We only have a few different subjects right now and I'll go into that a little bit later. But pretty much our whole idea is we're setting kids up for the future jobs or even the current jobs really because the way the education system is set up right now is very much so for the past. And we're trying to not only identify like what these kids' strengths are, but they're 21st century skills, which include like empathy and critical thinking and all those kinds of things. So we're trying to identify kids' passions and what they're naturally good at. And with our platform and learning system, each of our courses are self-paced. So when a student is going through any of our courses, it's completely at their own pace on their own time and we track that. We track how long each lesson is taking them, what they're kind of gravitating to because they can choose essentially whatever they want out of a web of different subjects and learning types. So we're using data to track not only how long it takes kids to complete certain tasks, but it also leans into and tracks their actual strengths, what they're good at and what they kind of gravitate towards naturally and what they like. And that helps to set them up for their own personal journeys for their future. So they're not just kind of getting into a career that they feel like they need to be into. It's leaning on their natural strengths for their future to pick a career for them that they actually like. And that is through education and gamification. Okay, so what is gamification? Gamification is taking anything and making it a game. So if I'm a student, I don't want to read a textbook. I'd probably rather watch a YouTube video or something like that. But if you want to go into that, because it's more hands-on and it's a little less boring for them, but if you go into that a little bit further, what gamification does is it takes learning and puts the student into it and makes a game out of it. Sure, it kind of reminds me of Duolingo a little bit, although I'm sure it's more of a game of what you're doing, because I do Duolingo to learn languages. It makes it more fun when you're doing it on your phone and things like that and you're competing against people and you get points and stuff like that. You know, it's actually cool with what we're doing with it. I know you're about to say something, but just to give a little bit more clarity around gamification. So think of a map, right? With a bunch of different dots and quests that you're going through. And these kids, as they're going through, not only are they learning and we're tracking everything that they're doing and how long it takes, but they're actually getting something as well. They're able to create their own characters, whether it be a wizard, a soldier or a healer, they're able to interact with their peers and they're able to level up their characters. So the more that they learn, the more they level up, the more gear that they get, so on and so forth. So it's very much like an eSports game. Yeah, exactly. It's like you're playing a video game, but you're also learning. So it's like taking the learning, but you're leveling up your character as well. So think of it as like, if you in real life leveled up from going running, you get XP or anything like that. Sure, sure. So what age ranges are you working with these kids? We're really leaning towards middle school, high school. The goal is to be able to reach everybody, but we're only a year in, so that's our current demographic right now. And we actually have tried some of our courses out in a few local schools in New Jersey, and we had a two week eSports camp in Massachusetts. Even though it was over the pandemic, it was a social distance and everything like that. And we're actually implementing these at a nonprofit in Massachusetts as well called The Base. So The Base is like a physical activity center for underprivileged kids that go there. They have like their basketball teams or baseball teams, but they wanted to incorporate eSports. So Helix eSports is the gaming side of it. That's super fun, but in order for these kids to be able to game, they have to go through our courses first. Okay, well, we do have a question from a viewer and it is, do you have concern from parents that kids are spending too much time in front of screens? I think so. I definitely think that parents have a lot of concern about that, but aside from it actually not being great for their eyes, however many hours a day, that is something that I think parents should think about. I think they should look into the statistics and the information and make sure that it's not actually physically affecting their children. I think it's less about screen time and more like the quality of the screen time because you can watch TV all day or you can be doing something productive. And with gaming, a lot of that is kind of productive because a lot of it is social, a lot of it is skill building. And if they're playing Minecraft, for example, especially if they're a younger age, they're learning in Minecraft because forever who isn't familiar with that game, not only is there a coding aspect to it if you wanna get into that with Minecraft education, but it teaches them scientific like mixtures, like if lava hits water, it turns into coal or anything like that, it's pretty cool. So I think to answer that question in a more succinct way, it's more about what's on the screen rather than how long they're looking at it. Sure, and it seems to me that watching television would be more passive and certainly for many years, kids have been watching TV for many hours a day. And adults too. Yeah, sure. And you're shifting that screen time from passive to active possibly, so that makes sense. So who are your customers? Right now we're working with a private school in New Jersey called St. Leo the Great Catholic School. And we actually are implementing a whole curriculum into their school. It started with an eSports elective class where essentially they just got to game and learn things and learn how to like create their own company and their own pitch decks and things like that. But we have other programs that we're working on right now that we're going to beta test at that school. And there's another school. I don't remember the name of it, but it's in Union in New Jersey. And actually we just implemented a semester long Hearthstone class, which Hearthstone is a competitive card game by the company Blizzard, who creates like World of Warcraft and things like that. It's called Hearthstone. But we're using Hearthstone to teach kids probability and statistics. So they're learning through this digital card game, probability and statistics just naturally as the game really kind of leans in on those things. And not many people would think about that. Outside of those two schools, I mentioned that we have a partnership with the base Boston, Massachusetts, which is a center for underprivileged kids around the area. And Helix City Sports is our partner as well, the biggest land center in the country. They have three locations right now. One in Boston, Massachusetts, or one in Foxborough, Massachusetts at attached to Patriots Stadium, the football team. They have one in Bergen, New Jersey, and they have one in Lakewood, New Jersey. You know, I could see this also being good for corporations for training their employees or for other learning modules where people, you know, even for college or post grad work, what do you think about that? Well, it's honestly funny that you say that because that is in our future business plans. Essentially, without giving too much away, we would like to be like the Uber of education. And we're looking for investments right now. So we have it all in our decks. If anyone wants to reach out to me and learn more about it. But essentially our goal is, if you want to learn anything, our tagline is the best education available to all. And if you want to learn anything, our goal for our platform is to have you be able to log in and then you get a teacher immediately. You get an expert immediately that's able to sit there with you and talk to you and train you aside from our courses as well. And then with the corporate side of things, of course, we're more children focused now with like in school focus now. Oh, and all of our courses are aligned with the standards, the state standards of curriculums for schools. So like all of our stuff is legit. It ties into state standards of every school. And for the corporate side of that, with our platform where you like kind of level up, we track how long it takes you to look at things and we track your natural skills and 21st century skills. We do plan on implementing that into the corporate world because it just makes sense because working at Microsoft, I had to do a ton of trainings, a ton of digital trainings and they're boring. They're just a video that you're watching and then you take a quiz after. But if it was more engaging, if I was able to level up, if I was able to have like a boss battle with somebody or like at the end of all the trainings, you have this giant boss battle and if you have this much XP from doing this much trainings, then you can beat it kind of like a Pokemon Go, but for learning like how much more would people be engaged? It's just like a Fitbit, like that's gamification. That's gamification of exercise. Right, right, right. That makes sense. Is your background in education or gaming or both? It's both. I started at Microsoft in the education space doing community events at schools. I actually, St. Leo, the great that I'm working with at this new company, we connected with them through Microsoft, through working for them because I ran educational seminars for kids. A lot of it was like coding and Minecraft and how to make your own game. I did a LinkedIn course one time. So I do have an education background as well as an eSports background because I went from my educational events at Microsoft to doing gaming events because that's more my passion. And I love kind of like living with them both right now. It's really exciting. Sure. So what projects are you working on right now? So right now we are building our curriculums. I'm setting up schedules so that we can sell everything that we have. So essentially we have a graphic design course, a web design course, coding, vlogging, YouTuber and content creator, as well as the probability and statistics. And we're actually working on a course right now that just helps you get better at the game League of Legends. It's less education, more just getting better at the game. So I'm working on building these curriculums currently in a fun dynamic way. So what are... Oh, go ahead. I know that's it actually. Okay, so what are some of your favorite projects that you've worked on through your work with Augmented? Well, this year, believe it or not, with the pandemic, we still came out really strong and we were having physical events happening even with the social guidelines in place. And over the summer, we went to Helix Esports in Foxboro, Massachusetts and it was a two week long course with the base who we are also partners with. That's how that blossomed. And that's so far this year, one of my favorite things that I've worked on. And over that camp, it took 30 underprivileged kids, some of them never even touched a computer before. They didn't have access to it. I was like actually blown away that some of them have never touched a computer before. Cause if you think like everybody has a computer now, but that's honestly not the case. They might have an iPad. So we took these kids and they had to create their own company or their personal brand as a group. Or individuals, they had to learn graphic design to create their own logos and their own websites. They had to write a biography page for themselves. They had to learn how to do a sponsorship pitch deck so that they could pitch their company. And then at the end of the two week course, they made a video using CGI with a company called LiveCGI that had like a, like a mocap suit and the kids were able to like kind of explain it in this digital space, which was really fun for them. But it also gave them the tools to be their own entrepreneurs eventually so that they can have their own brand and create their own merch and have their own website and do everything themselves, do their marketing, everything. Have you noticed growth from students before they started doing your course or your program to when it was done? Yeah, it was actually amazing. And this is kind of always how it goes, right? Like the one kid who, like I just said, like he had never had a computer before, of course, of course, of course, he was the best one of the whole entire class because he was kind of just like excited to learn how to use it and he was the most dedicated. And honestly, his graphic designs that he came up with were like some of the best in the entire class or the entire camp rather. So you really did see the growth. And after they were done with their learning courses, which was a little bit of a slot for them sometimes, even with the boss battles and the leveling up their character and all that fun stuff, they just kind of wanted to like game at the end. But that's kind of the point, right? You play to have, you work hard to play hard. So to the point of were they growing throughout the week, it was actually amazing to see how much they actually grew. And once they got to the creative portion of the learnings, AKA making their own logo and kind of designing their own website, they were just crazy engaged. It was really awesome to say, just by being able to have their own freedom to create whatever they wanted. And that's kind of what the education system needs right now. And that's kind of like what we're trying to do. We're trying to lean in on the individual strengths of these kids while not penalizing them for what they don't know, but really like rewarding them and enriching them and trying to grow them and what they are naturally good at. So do you think that, how do you think the pandemic has impacted your business and also the fundamental concept of your business the gamification of learning? Yeah, it was a huge blow. I think to everybody, obviously, because our original plan was to have physical camps throughout the summer. Like we had a week long course ready to go like physical camps at all the Helix locations. Like we were already selling tickets. Like it was already good. And then the pandemic happened and we were like, oh no, what do we do now? But fortunately everything that we had made was web based. So the only thing that we had to change really was taking our physical camps to the online platform. And the only thing that we added was using Discord. I don't know if all of the viewers are familiar with Discord, but it's essentially a chat platform where you have your own server and you can create your own channels and it's super interactive and customizable. So we use this platform called Discord to connect all the students and teach them, use video calls, give them updates daily. And we just took our physical camps that we had planned for the summer and turn them digital. And it was natural, honestly, because our platform is online and it is web based. The biggest problem we had with that was like onboarding because if you have kids in a room together, it's easy to kind of be with them and help them create accounts and log in and download the software that they need because they're there to learn. But if they're at home and it is a little bit more difficult, but that was our really, that was the biggest hurdle for us. And it ended up being pretty good. Sure. So you have had some events and let's look at some of the photos. Let's start with the Microsoft photo. So since my background is education and eSports, the Microsoft photo that we're going to bring up, this was a tournament series that I ran that is one of my favorite events. The Helix eSports event of this last summer was my favorite event of the year, but a video, I'm super into conventions. I miss them dearly because with COVID they don't happen anymore. So I really miss conventions a lot. And I used to run tournaments at them for Microsoft and the picture that we're seeing right now is a convention called a video game con. I ran Overwatch tournament, Fortnite, I think a Rocket League tournament and a League of Legends tournament. And it was just really fun, not educational, but super fun. And with things like that, I hope you don't mind me going on a mini tangent, but kind of with Augment eSports we're looking for ways to identify the strengths of individuals. And with gaming, I think that's a great way to do that because I don't know if anyone is familiar with the speed running world. It is a big part of the gaming community, less than the eSports community, but somebody who speed runs a game replays the same game over and over again to get the fastest completion time. So some people beat this really long game in like 30 minutes using glitches and that takes a particular kind of like mindset. That's a particular kind of person that has particular strengths and maybe like analytics or data or just like comprehension or anything like that. And that's what we're trying to capture. So with gaming tournaments, I think a lot of parents would kind of see gaming as a big waste of time, which it absolutely can be because people do struggle with like gaming addictions. It is real, but I think if you look a little bit deeper and think, why does my kid like this? Are they good at it? What are they good at? That'll help them kind of like figure out what they need to do. And with that, there's so many different jobs outside of just being a competitive gamer. So if your kid is interested in gaming, maybe he won't be a professional gamer, but he can be the production team or something like that. Even an eSports lawyer. Right, right. That sounds familiar. So we actually met at, we were both at the Casino eSports conference and that was in the 3D environment. Were you on a panel? I was on a panel. I was a moderator on two panels. I don't think I was a guest on any this year. I was a guest on one in Las Vegas, but not, or Boston, but not this one. I moderated two panels. I can't remember what they were at the time. Sure, yeah, I was on a panel and it's hard to remember the thing, but it was really interesting. Because you do so many, right? Like I just did another one about eSports amateurism and that's a blur to me now too. So what was interesting about that one is that we were in that 3D environment and jumping around and stuff. That was kind of fun. Does that kind of remind you of some of the things that you do with augmented ed? I would love to use something like that for the kids because it is kind of similar though, except for the running around, they do get to create their own character. And I think it does definitely tie into what I've done with the kids because they just care about their own individuality. And that's something I liked about that platform too for the Casino eSports conference. Like I like that you can create your own avatar and just move around and be yourself. And while that doesn't directly align with what we're doing, I think the message behind that is kids just want to be individuals and they care about customization. And if you can tie that into your education somehow and let them be a more individual, that really helps. And creating their own custom avatar really helps. Sure, sure. Yeah, definitely. I would think for introverts, it would probably help them communicate or... I think it does. And that's why kids are so drawn to video games, especially if they're introverted because it's incredibly social, but they don't have the pressure of if they feel insecure about the way they look, they can be anything that they want on the internet. And I think that's important too. I think instead of looking at it in a I don't understand kind of way, I think parents should kind of look at it to understand and see who their kid is and kind of lean in on their personal strengths. Sure. And let's bring up the League of Legends photo. Oh, yeah. Yeah, what was that event? So that was a series that I did when I worked for Microsoft. It was a weekly tournament series, specifically for League of Legends. We had a partnership with Riot. So every week, depending on how many kids, I would usually get like 30 because it was a weekly kind of local thing, but 30 kids would come out every week and compete for hours every single Saturday, the same kids so that they can get in-game money for League of Legends provided by Riot who created League of Legends. So that was honestly, I had been in just cause it's kind of like an energetic photo and League of Legends is a great game in general and it has a huge community. And again, not education, but local events like that are important because like you said, with the avatars and somebody who's a little bit more introverted, that's their safe space. Video games are their safe space. So now they're taking what they're doing at home, alone on their computer, talking to people, being social, but it's like they're physically really talking to people and really being social now because they're in an environment and they have that kind of talking points. They could talk about the game that they're all there for. It's the same as like a club, really. It's the same as like Boy Scouts. It's the same as anything like that, baseball, soccer. Or what, okay. So let's bring up the Rutgers. Oh yeah. So Rutgers eSports, eSports is really big right now in the collegiate, or it's getting bigger in the collegiate like circuit around the entire nation right now. And of course the world's, but it is growing in colleges and Rutgers eSports was very, very early on it. So I worked with them like three to four years ago, I think probably three, two to three years ago now. And they were the largest collegiate operation in the state of New Jersey, probably the tri-state for eSports. And funny enough, they weren't an actual like confirmed sport at their college. So they didn't get the funding that their football team got or their baseball team got. So this group of kids took their passion for gaming and grew it into this really large community that they really got to turn into this giant, they built their own land center now. So they took it from nothing, not even being considered a real sport to now the school is building them an actual like land center with computers and things like that. So they didn't have to rely so much on sponsors and outside support of the school. And they were definitely, if you're a college and you're looking to get into eSports at all, they're someone to look at because they did a great job. And now you have things like the collegiate star league, which I think actually doesn't, no, that doesn't exist anymore. So you have the collegiate star league, you have Tespa, which doesn't exist anymore, but they relied on them heavily. Now you have all these different organizations for colleges, for eSports. And it's really important. And I think that that needs to grow because it is just the future of colleges. And it makes kids want to go to college again because maybe if you're home and you're streaming on Twitch, you're like, why would I go to college? I'm just gonna try to be a streamer. But if you have these eSports programs and they have scholarships that kids actually care about, which I know that I wish I remembered, I think it's the college of Ohio. I have, I wish I remembered better, but they're kind of looking into different sponsorships into their eSports program. And I was told about a few of them. I'm not gonna blow up their spot, but I was like, man, if I was 17 right now and I heard that a college had this program for video games, I would go to that college. I wouldn't even care about another one. So I think with college going down and remote learning, they need to do something. So eSports is definitely a way to get the kids more invested into college again. And with really quickly because we're almost out of time, the Game-a-con picture, what is that? Game-a-con is one of the larger events that I ran. So we had over a hundred kids in this eSports tournament for Game-a-con, which is created by Ari Fox, who created the Casino eSports Conference in Ben Fox. And it's a giant gaming convention, and I had the pleasure of running a tournament with like over a hundred entries and it was super fun and amazing. And I think the kid who won was like probably 11. And he was playing against adults. Wow. Well, Jennifer, it's been great having you on my show. Yeah, we're so fast. We learned a lot. So thank you very much. Yeah, no problem. And thank you to our guest who wrote in the question and thank you for joining us today. Yeah, I think that was a really good question. Next week, my guest will be eSports coach JJ Nicole. See you then.