 Welcome to the wide world of eSports, the show devoted to all things eSports. I'm your host, Katharine Norr. Today our topic is North America Scholastic eSports Federation, learning through the lands of eSports. With me is Gerald Solomon, founder and executive director of NAESA and Kevin Brown, the director of education and training. Welcome Gerald and Kevin. Great day. Thanks for having us. All right, so what is North America Scholastic eSports Federation? You know, it's a great question and I tried to create an elevator statement. Very simple. NAESA, which is what we go by, is simply project-based learning through the lands of eSports in a virtual world. It's going where kids are, talking to their language, go where they hang out and give them an opportunity to learn skills and create curriculum and skill pathways so they can thrive and grow and have fun all at the same time. We know that kids learn best when they play and they enjoy learning, so that's what we've created. Why did you start it? Wow, that's a good question. So prior to this, for 13 years, I ran a very successful large family foundation called the Sembole Foundation. They are the founders of Broadcom, a chip manufacturing company, one of the largest in the world. And all of the philanthropy we did, I was the global executive director, was around youth development in STEM and STEM education. And after 10 years of spending millions and millions of dollars, I came to the conclusion and shared with the principals that we weren't really reaching the kids we wanted to reach. We didn't want to do the franchise, the disengaged, kids of color, kids who didn't feel part of things, we're not the baseball player, the football player, the basketball player. And in all the research, we found out that they were hanging out playing games. Many of them just casual gamers, but that's where they were. And we said, and we figured out how to reach them through gaming, put them together, let them feel like they can belong and enjoy, and in that opportunity, make them aware of careers and through that, find pathways for them to be able to thrive and grow. And we have flourished since we're a nonprofit, everything was philanthropically based. Our program is 100% free. All of our curriculum, Kevin, who's with me, is the person who I gave a grant to, to work with 14 teachers from the University of California and Orange County Department of Ed to build a full four-year high school curriculum, CTE curriculum and middle school curriculum, got it approved by the Department of Education in California, we're the only one in the world that has that. And the rest of it is, is history now. So Kevin, tell us more about the program and what you provide. Sure, if we wouldn't mind putting up that eSports ecosystem, I will tell you that when I got the call from Gerald and from the Orange County Department of Ed where I work to develop curriculum, which is what I was doing at the time, they asked me to write something, a career tech education piece that would link with English language arts. But through the needle of eSports, I remember throwing my phone at the screen, rage quitting, as we say, because I thought, no, we're not thumb monkeys. I'm not going to write a course for a bunch of kids in a sport where they don't even sweat. I was the very first, very loud, very early decryer. And then Gerald shared with me this, this ecosystem. And I saw in an instant what was going on. We all tend to think that eSports is just this. We just play games until our eyes bleed. And that's the player in the middle. That's kind of the stereotype that we all think. But if you look at that, there are these large concepts we call domains. Identity, we see four there. I'd layer one on top, health and wellness, both mental and physical. And these domains shower out into kinds of work. And as a career tech education teacher myself, I could see organizers. I see event organizers. That's what I taught in hotel hospitality. I taught people how to put on banquets. And then I saw for strategist, I saw the education strength and how we have teacher education. Well, there's a coach and there's a theory crafter and an analyst. I began to understand that eSports wasn't just this. It could lean into all of these things. So much like Hawaii, we've got in California, 15 career pathways sectors and 58 kinds of jobs that are that we can teach in high schools and colleges. Same thing at nine of those 15 pathways lean into eSports. So very quickly understood this is a teaching vehicle. This is a very elegant way to get, as Gerald said, meet kids where they are, do what they're doing, but show them that what they're learning is applicable. So what you do in your web, your web design class isn't just an exercise. You build something for your club. I need, you know, I want to put on an event. Well, somebody's got to pull the wires, put the PCs together, make sure everything's working like our event today. That's also a class you can take. There's immediate applicability. So I was in from the word going. It's been four years now and I continue to love it. So Gerald, what, what kind of services do you provide and who do you provide them to? So our services, first of all, are free. Again, we believe in just our philosophy that education is a fundamental right for all human beings and no one should be limited by the zip code they're born in the color of their skin, their gender preference, whatever it may be, everyone is entitled to opportunity. So all of our programming is free. Our curriculum is open sourced. It's subject to creative common licensing, which is very open. It just requires attribution. And then we provide orientation and training. Kevin and his team, the Orange County Department of Ed and others who are credentialed teachers and educators, teach people on how to integrate all of that. We do it for middle school. We do it for high school. We do it for afterschool programs, Y's, Boys and Girls Clubs, libraries, and we really create these pathways for youngsters to begin to just connect what they enjoy doing to opportunities. And in part of what, and Kevin can speak to it better than I, part of what we create are these opportunities for kids to see themselves through this lens of eSports. Like, you know, I like, you know, Overwatch, League of Legends, Call of Duty, Minecraft, whatever. But I'm not really competitive. I'm never going to be that one one thousandth of a percent of a pro who can make, you know, some money. And then when they're 22, they're done. What do I do with it? Well, you know what? I'm really artistic and I really like logo design and I really like social media work. So why don't I do that for the club? And why don't I do that for the school and do it for the eSports program in the school? So they now become part of all of that in the way it works. It's really a way to engage kids in ways that is really enjoyable for them. Sure. And Kevin, have you had pushback from parents at all about this? Yes, very short story. Yes, let's put it this way, because parents and educators, especially those who are successful, I think about everybody that, you know, has a doctorate or an EdD educational doctorate sitting on a school board or a superintendent will tell me, look, I didn't need eSports to get where I am, and I'm a successful person. I am first in my class. I am a woman of color. I have arrived at this position. I never had eSports to benefit me. I did it the old fashioned way. I used a book. I worked really hard. I earned my position and I would never take that away from anybody. And I will say that this is generational learning. Twenty years ago, thirty years ago, we didn't have 24 seven news cycle, immediate instant access to any kind of knowledge anywhere on the globe. And we certainly didn't have these unique online, these virtual communities that we could use as teachers, as students to engage learning to reach a kind of kid who typically would not try out for sports, doesn't believe in the drama of the drama club, but will come to the table if there are eSports involved. So I remember going to a board meeting here in Orange County. It was one evening and as I was walking up to the podium to make a presentation, a board member stood up and literally stuck out her long finger and said, you, sir, are no better than a heroin pusher. You are pushing addictive mentality on our kids. How can you tell us eSports is good? And I was paralyzed for a second about that, thinking, am I, do we really do that? And it was another board member who said that's not a NACEP issue. That's not my personal issue. That's not even a game developer issue that starts with parenting. It starts with what we call a stakeholder. There are four prime stakeholders in NACEP. There is the student, there is the adult that is the general manager that moderates a club that we help them set up. There are parents and there are educators. We want mom and dad to be part to understand what's going on, what the benefit is. I spent four or five days a week doing parent information sessions where I show them the clinical research that shows that actually our club model is the defeat for addictive behavior, that it brings kids out of isolation. Go ahead, Joel. I think part of what you just said really resonates and that is one, we do it through the lens of learning and education. I mean, our kids play an average of only 23 minutes a week. It's really all of the other activities. They form clubs. They create a business plan. They elect officers. They operate as entrepreneurs. They empower themselves individually as a unit to grow and thrive. We have incredible research. Again, when I was with the foundation and had the resources, we gave a grant to Dr. Steinquiller and Dr. Edo and others, you know, world renowned people in research in virtual learning and virtual gaming and the like who got IRB approval. It did four years of our data analysis of our work, not gaming, but our approach of the club and the curriculum. And the evidence is so clear and the data is so clear, but in addition to the research, when parents and educators see it, they start to say, hmm, maybe there's something here. The other is, and if you could put that slide back up, the ecosystem, I'll explain it for a second. We don't just play games. When kids congregate to participate in the play of a title, they also have to show the artifacts of their learning. So when a teacher or a parent comes into a classroom, they will see the fandom artwork, the local development. They will see the streaming that's been created. They will see how they created the event management, what Excel spreadsheets and how they worked and put things together in the brackets that were developed. They will see the marketing tools. They will see the website that was created and developed. So when you walk into our competitions, you see the learning, not just the fun in the play. And that has profound impact on a parent when they say, wow, this is more than just playing games. My kids are actually learning skills that they can use to go far beyond the industry of gaming and eSports. You know, I think it's interesting about the ecosystem because this my show here, the wide world of eSports is really about the eSports ecosystem, because I have people in all areas of eSports on my show, which include, I'm an attorney, I've had lawyers on who practice eSports law. I've had people in Hollywood on. I've had people, a lot of people in marketing, a lot of people in education in all different areas. I mean, I've had a psychologist called Psych Sensei. I've had the gamer doc on. So I mean, it's very broad in terms of what you can do, right? Right. Just look at your own setup for this, Catherine, the people who had to make sure that the internet's working right, all the technology pieces, the people that had to market this event for you today, the people that had to do all of the sundry back in back office for lack of a better term work. You would not be successful if they weren't good at what they did. How did they get there? In some cases, they got there through robotics or they got there through just a passion of something that brought them into gaming or eSports or some other way. What we're trying to do is actually provide those articulated pathways and expose them to things because not everyone has a lawyer doctor or engineer as a parent, not everyone has resources to be able to afford robotics after school. How do you give them those opportunities to see ways? Well, wow, you mean I'm not really competitive at a game, but I really dig this other stuff. And if I could do that through gaming and I can get a job doing that and make a living, man, that's pretty cool stuff. I like doing that. And for parents, I'd have to say the fact that many parents don't realize that there are several hundred universities and colleges that offer scholarships to take whatever course you want, whatever major you want, but come and play what you're going to come and play your game, you'll get a partial or a full ride on that. When parents become aware of that, that's an opportunity that maybe they had an experience that is now valuable, a possibility for their kids. Or I think that a lot of people, you know, what I see is typically people telling me that they want their kids to be either doctors or lawyers. Of course, I shake my head when they say lawyer. And that's right. You know, and I think, but, you know, the world is big. There is all this new technology, you know, there are a lot of of opportunities in tech that people should take advantage of. So it has, you know, how long have you been doing this and what do you think the future is for? So we've been we've been doing this for three years now. And what's really interesting is I think the future is is without boundaries. It's endless because technology, obviously, is here to stay. We'll always continue to evolve and grow. How do you get people interested in it? And, you know, we now have partnerships with entities we never thought we would be working with. A great example is Homeland Security and the State Department. You know, we set up clubs. The clubs are really nothing more than entrepreneurial developmental vehicles. Where do we give kids the opportunity to think about democracy, think about capitalism, think about creating a business, fail and learn, fail and learn again. When you give kids those opportunities, it's really amazing. We just did a project with the State Department on farmcraft. We created a world in Minecraft. And in it, they learned about agriculture. They learned about biotechnology. They learned about biochemistry. They had to buy seeds, buy water. They had to cultivate. They had to deal with infestations of all kinds of insects, and then they had to produce a crop. Then they had to sell the crop. And, you know, what better way than to have fun in a team and learn and work together to do it. And believe me, they failed a lot of times through that process. But it was fun. But look what they got exposed to. They, many of them would never thought of a career in agriculture or biotechnology or biochemistry in those areas. We had 41 countries around the world, 2700 schools that participated in that alone. We've done Rue Goldberg, for example, and taken a basic engineering design program that's been in middle school and some high schools for 40 years in at least American culture and brought it into a digital world and brought it all around the world. So it really is a great entry point for kids who experience, explore all types of learning with the use of technology, but that's fun, but that's controlled through a curriculum. When I, when I watched a webinar on Minecraft and how it's used in education, I really wish that I was a kid right now because that would be a really fun thing to learn. That's it. So how has the pandemic impacted NASA and your mission? Yeah, so I think in Pevin Chimein, where you can, for us, the pandemic has actually been helpful. I'll give you a great example. During COVID, when it first arose, we were in conversations with the American Space Benjamin Franklin Library in Mexico City and Alejandro Barron, who is the representative there for the State Department, said, you know, we need some help. Our kids, less than 10% of the kids who are attending school virtually, what can we do? How can we help? So again, we used Minecraft because it's accessible and easy and we built out a program and a competition where kids in Minecraft had to build the COVID-19 virus. They had to build the COVID home they wanted to live in and the COVID hospital got forbid they would be treated in. In less than three weeks, we had over 3,000 students in Mexico Public School System who participated in our competition. That became the launchpad and the entry point for the public school system to reengage the students and to bring them in into education and learning in a time where everything was virtual. We see that over and over again and now we hybridize it. We do it in person. We do it virtual. We do it in all different ways. COVID just accelerated what I think all of us thought, which was technology was going to be a lead in education. We thought we could control it. COVID taught us we can't and we have to figure out how to adapt. I'll tell you what we did as well. NASA pivoted on a dime when I remember March two years ago now. We stopped playing our traditional games when kids were locking down. They couldn't get together. They couldn't get to school to practice to be able to gear up and use the technology they had at school. They were left with whatever they had at home, whether it was a console based PS5 or something or even a mobile device, just something that that's all they had. So we took over our Discord site and we made it sort of an open, friendly, yet safe and monitored space to bring in kids to say, look, you don't need to worry about the fact that you're on your own. There is a community. There's a virtual community. Let's live in that community. So every day, every week, we had a different series of games, just little things. We played among us a lot, right? We played all kinds of animal crossing, anything that would engage kids because social emotional learning is as important a takeaway as it is your math, your science, your history, your foreign language. So we adapted in that way and showed that again, that there's this idea that there's this community behind it. What we do is we build clubs and a club can be virtual. So COVID really taught us we can stretch, we can go beyond, we can do things we hadn't thought. Gerald mentioned about failing forward. And I think that's what it was, learning how to pivot and take what we're doing. It became the sort of lead, the banner for teachers to say, you can do this with your curriculum as well. You don't have to be in class for this. And as we've grown internationally, we have kids who for the first time are friends with people all over the world. These are kids that would never have traveled, don't have the resources or whatever it may be that are the limitations, they now have an entire cohort of colleagues and friends from all over the world that they hook up with to the ability to learn, to grow, to communicate, to engage in team activities, all the kinds of core what we call 24 century skills, soft skills, whatever employers want to call them. That has been a key attribute and aspect of what we bring to the table for student you know, evolution and development. Now you're your North America North American Federation. Are there Federations and organization like yours and other countries or how do you relate? Yeah, so we so we when we spun out, I was so in love with this concept that I with the San Moelles worked in arrangement to where I literally left the foundation and took this into a nonprofit entity and now run the nonprofit in the legal entity is actually called W. W. S. E. F. Not N. A. S. E. F. And it stands for worldwide Scholastic Esports Foundation. And that's the global entity. We went ahead and trademark that all around the world and that will become the moniker as we evolve and grow. Our core is NACF. Our value brand is around NACF. That's what most people around the world really know. But we're building this worldwide. There are a lot of Esport programs around the world. But our lens of academics is unique. You may or may not know. I was honored recently to be asked to be the worldwide chair of Esports Education for IESF. The International Esports of Foundation Federation. They have something like 118 countries and they understand that education is part and parcel and partners do the whole idea of gaming and play. They understand the nexus between play and learning. So they have asked me to cheer this new commission within this global organization and to take our work and to expand it and bring it into Esports programs all around the world. So loss of opportunity. Yeah, that's fantastic. I had gotten that word. So what what areas of the world are embracing Esports education the most? Either one of you. Wow. Everybody knows, I think, NACF, that the S stands for Scholastic. That's why they come to the table is looking at how can we take the curriculum? How can we right size it? How can we localize it? How can we match it? Take those California and US educational standards and make it right for Central America. Make it right for Europe, South Africa. Asia is very big. I'd say that probably Gerald, you think Asia is the biggest driver because they put, I think, most of their emphasis on education. They realized that they want their kids to thrive and grow and education is the means by which to do that. So we spend a lot of time in webinars calls really trying to find the best way forward. It starts with our very large partner in Japan. NACF Japan is going great gangbusters, 150 high schools up and down the islands. And now, as Gerald said, as early as this morning, we were speaking to the subcontinent India and 19 other countries surrounding it that are all looking to take this on from a scholastic point of view. And you know, there's a lot here that we're delivering. And thank you, Catherine, for the opportunity. But our website's really easy. It's NACF.org. So you could just go NACF.org. And in some cases, people say there's too much on your website. And there probably is. But it's filled with data, with videos, with curriculum, with research information and the like. So if you went there or if you just wanted more information, it's simple info at nasaf.org. And it goes to Kevin, myself and others who filter through that and respond to it. So there's a lot there and we're glad to help. And again, our work is free. We don't charge educational systems, afterschool programs, libraries, youth development organization, religious institutions, et cetera, because we believe kids need to grow and the kids need to thrive. And this is one of many vehicles that could be a value for them. So Hawaii hasn't really caught onto eSports and gaming so much in our economy. I mean, a little bit, but not so much. Do you think that there's a big role for you here in Hawaii? I'm hoping so. I said off here with you that I am on the wait list for a project called Movers and Shikas in Hawaii where I could come in and spend two months. And my goal would be if I could do that is to make Hawaii kind of a Pacific Rim hub for that. Use the University of Hawaii. Use the Department of Homeland Security. Use the folks that you know in the life and actually build this out in a way where it could have incredible academic and scholastic impact by providing kids pathways for STEM and STEAM learning and skills. But also it could help develop a truly robust economy and add value around future economic growth and development for the state of Hawaii. Yeah, and you know, we have such a close relationship with Asia. And I've, you know, I think that there's a lot of opportunity with Hawaii and Asia working together in eSports and gaming. We're almost done with our show today. I'm live. I'll give you both a last word as to how we can, you know, what you can do for those who are watching and how they can contact you. I mean, I'll let Kevin have the last word. I just think to parents and educators, don't be limited by stereotypical ideas of what gaming is. Sure, anything to an extreme can be unhealthy. But if you surrounded by a state credential curriculum and a club environment that really allows kids to grow and thrive, it's amazing what can happen to your students and to your children. Kevin, last word yours. We're all here to support. It is my great pleasure to be pulled out of the classroom and add a curriculum development and use those skills as a sensitivity, kind of a barometer to understand those stakeholders, the parents, the educators, the administrators, but also understand the kids. I'm a gamer at heart myself. Just like you're saying, Catherine, I could have gone back. I was old school, Dungeons and Dragons back in the 70s, playing back then, the grandfather of all these games, helping others to understand the real benefit of this. Yes, it's fun. Yes, it's a game. It's not necessarily increased screen time. It's applicability. It's taking what they're learning, finding a novel way to apply this, getting kids excited about their futures, getting kids excited about post-secondary education, knowing that there is a major, not just maybe a scholarship to play a game, but a career pathway where I can be that rock star. Maybe I'll never be this guy, but I'm the one, I'm the girl who's designing the next new org for Riot and League of Legends, or I'm doing something to contribute into this world that I very much love and appreciate. So we're here to help you with all of that. All right, terrific. Thank you so much for being my guest today, Kevin and Gerald. And thank you to our viewers for joining us today. Next week, my guest will be Jacob Miles, CEO of MAP Esports Network. See you then.