THE SCHOOLIFICATION OF COMPUTER GAMING – IDENTIFYING THE ROLE OF ESPORT IN SCHOOL SYLLABI

Abstract

The aim of this project is to examine the educational dimensions of esport as part of the course syllabi in secondary education. An increasing number of schools on the upper secondary level (in Sweden: gymnasium) are offering three-year programs with an “esport profile” within aesthetics and media. School marketing suggests that esport can work as a bait for potential students who are interested in playing computer games, but the scholastic values of computer gaming remain to be clarified. Whereas “gamification” is an established term for transforming educational (and other formal) practices into game-like activities, little has been said about its counterpart “schoolification”: how originally playful and informal practices are transformed to fit within school curricula and syllabi for achieving academic goals. A number of unanswered questions follow. For example, teachers have observed that students in the esport program are less motivated in schoolwork but are highly motivated gamers. Is this a question of what students learn, or how they learn? How do the students themselves perceive esport performance in relation to academic performance? What are their driving factors and can motivation in one domain transfer to another? How do students perceive fear of failure, gains of winning, competition and success, across esport and traditional school topics? Here, we address the challenges and procedures of setting up a practice-based research program where the practitioners (i.e. students, teachers, an esport coach and school leaders) collaborate with researchers in investigating the relationship between computer gaming and traditional teaching-and-learning activities in the classroom.