Electronic sport (esport) is a popular and rapidly growing phenomena all over the world today, and just as traditional sports, it attracts people of all ages and of all levels. In recent years it has been possible to attend esport profiles at upper secondary schools, just like for example football or hockey schools, thus making esport a big part of the students’ everyday life, as well as their studies. The Swedish, Finnish and Norwegian vocational schools who are running this project have had esport profiles for several years, and they all has seen that the integration of esport into regular school has increased motivation, integration and the graduation rate if its handled didactically and pedagogically well by educators. However, they have also discovered that the lack of standardised classes and learning goals is something that is an impediment for the further development of esport in schools. The goal for this project is to develop tested and evaluated course content and assignments connected to the esports classes, which is something that do not exist today. This is a great lack since it makes it difficult to work with a standardized and professional course content in esports. In this project two teachers from each school will meet three times to develop three VET esport courses; 1) Tactics and Planning, 2) Health and Life Management and 3) Multicultural Teamwork and Gender Equality. All courses will be piloted with five students and one teacher in Finland, Norway and Sweden. Based on feedback from the pilots the educational material will be developed even further. Standards for the connection of the courses to national curricula of the participating countries will be made. In the project we also raise awareness and increase knowledge of healthy and professional esport on a national level. On the European level we aim to enlarge this VET esport education network for further development in the future.
With this project our goal was for our educators to gain new perspectives and experiences by planning the project and to later convert the theoretical assignments into practical assignments by letting our students try them out. By evaluating the assignments together with the students the ambition was to create sustainable, high qualitative assignments within important aspects of esports in education. The produced material was to be implementable in different countries and cultures, as well as consider wide representation and address inequality and bias in esports. The project partners had a shared experience of structural weakness in education of healthy digital interaction and communication in early education. This further emphasised the need for training students in multicultural co-operation and communication, and issues around gender equality. In retrospect we are very satisfied with the outcome of this project based on the goals and ambitions in the project.
The participating schools found our former common project very rewarding but during this first project we also realized that each school did practical class assignments, writing exams and tasks in different ways even though our curriculums had common denominators. During our first project we started to discuss the possibilities to have a project to dig deeper regarding these common denominators and to learn and evolve our pedagogical ways of teaching esports. The goal with the project was to create qualitative practical assignments from different important aspects within esport sprung out of each country’s curriculum and for these tasks to be standardized in our classes in the future. The project enabled our educators and coaches to collaborate in the first phase and then in the second phase let our students from each school try our assignments and evaluate them. For our educators to try the tasks with our students and later refine them based on student feedback was successful. The project resulted in very high quality tasks for educators and coaches to continue to use in our esports program, as well as distribute them on the Erasmus platform for other schools to implement.