Esports. Education is not a game, or is it?
For this last week, I have been exploring the world of Esports as part of the Microsoft Education eSports teacher academy. My main interest in terms of being a teacher was to see how and more importantly why I should incorporate Esports into my classroom. So what is Esports? Just like traditional sports, we can recognize, Esports is wide and varied. It ranges from organized competitive video gaming which is a lways human v human, g ames of skill, t ournaments played online and offline at events for prizes. Esports are gender-neutral , can be i ndividual or team with p ro gamers specializing in one game. So what are the benefits of Esports in education? A lot of the benefits around Esports are focused on p ositive psychology, with the development, if correctly scaffolded of a sense of c ommunity including the t ransferable social skills, which are particularly beneficial to those students who are autistic as it provides a safe environment to explore developing mechanisms to cope and to