forget football: how fantasy sports are helping kids learn

by Corinne Iozzio | @corinneiozo | September 4th 2015 At 11:30am

Forget football: How fantasy sports are helping kids learn

Forget football: How fantasy sports are helping kids learn http://www.engadget.com/2015/09/04/fantasy-sports-in-schools/

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By his second semester on the job in 2009, Eric Nelson, a civics and history teacher at North

Lakes Academy in the Minneapolis suburbs, was at a loss. No matter what tool he used --

gripping news articles, an interactive map of YouTube trending videos, a failed-state index --

he couldn't manage to keep his students interested in world events for any extended period

of time. "They were just zombies," he recalls.

Nelson's is a common tale. Multiple studies have documented the growing trend of apathy

among young Americans toward world events. A National Geographic survey, for instance,

found that only 37 percent of young people (18-24) could locate Iraq on a map; 48 percent

think that Islam is the predominant religion in India (it's Hinduism); and 20 percent place

Sudan in Asia (it's the largest country in Africa).

Throwing up his hands in frustration one day, Nelson turned to his online fantasy football

league for a distraction. Instead, what he found was inspiration. Realizing how much he was

learning about the NFL in the process of managing his fantasy team, he thought: What if Iapplied the mechanisms and tools used in fantasy sports to world events? "The next day I

went in and [the class] drafted countries," he recalls, "and I scored them based on how many

times they were mentioned in the news." And thus Fantasy Geopolitics, an online tool to

engage students in world events, was born.


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As it turns out, Nelson isn't the first to gamify current events in this manner, but he has been

the most successful. In the past several years, short-lived communities for handicapping

Supreme Court decisions and congressional movements have sprung up at universities or as

one-off projects. But Fantasy Geopolitics is the only such program designed with classroom

learning in mind. The tool Nelson has created is robust enough to react to news in real time,

yet simple enough for the average sixth- to 12th-grader to use. "Fantasy football sets the

standard of fantasy sports," he says, "I believe Fantasy Geopolitics sets the standard for

fantasy learning."

It's a big claim, but the program has already seen rapid growth. Within a month of his initial

idea, Nelson couldn't keep up with scoring the news manually, so he contracted developer

friends to automate the system. And now, what began as a Google spreadsheet has become

a full-blown software-as-a-service network. In the winter of 2014, he formally launched the

platform online and began raising funds through Kickstarter. Today, some 50,000 students

and more than 1,000 teachers are using Fantasy Geopolitics as part of their history, civics and

world-events curriculum.

The basics of the game are simple: Teachers sign up, create a league and invite their

students to join. Students select countries during a web-based draft, and earn points based

on how their territories are performing in the news. Nelson and his developers created

software that monitors The New York Times website for names of countries. Every time a

nation is mentioned, the student who owns that country receives a point. So, in essence, a

story about Croatia has the same value as a quarterback passing for a touchdown. The

Fantasy Geopolitics website uses the tracking scripts Nelson and his developers created to

populate live maps and leaderboards automatically.


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Dashboard view includes rankings, messages and a news feed.

Version 2.0 launched in mid-August. In addition to being optimized for mobile devices, where

Nelson says many students track their teams and news, the update brings with it many

user-experience improvements. The new Fantasy Geopolitics dashboard includes tools for

trading teams, current rankings of the top news-making countries, and a map that

color-codes countries based on their current trending status. Pricing for the current school

year varies based on league size: The free starter plan allows for up to five players; 100

players costs $99 a year and 250 runs at $198.

According to Nelson, the updates help Fantasy Geopolitics become even more like fantasy

sports league dashboards, which are rich in information and context. "I got so into [fantasy

football] because there was all this information available about what was happening -- the

player updates and team updates," he says. "That can exist here; we just call it news. You can

engage with news and interact with it a little more fully. And then if you can adjust your

lineup, you compete better."


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The leaderboard shows who's on top and what countries they own.

Competition is what drives interest and encourages activity and research outside the game,

as well. There are fewer variables in Fantasy Geopolitics than football or baseball (or any

professional sport, for that matter), so scouting becomes even more strategic. Before the

draft, students must scour the news for trends and emerging stories. For instance, in an

Olympic year, countries that might otherwise fly under the radar could surge. And Djibouti, a

popular gag pick based on its name alone, could be a dark horse if Navy base Camp

Lemonnier makes headlines. (Case in point: It spiked in mid-August when it was announced

that China was looking to take over the base.)

To stay sharp throughout the season, students must closely monitor news about the countries

they own, while also keeping an eye on others that might be targets for potential trades. "I

discovered that students were actually starting to really study the news to gain a competitive

edge from week to week over their peers," says Gerald Huesken Jr., a teacher of history and

government at Elizabethtown Area High School in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, who's been

using Fantasy Geopolitics in his classroom.

Huesken, Nelson and many other teachers report that students are even taking the game to

their own channels, such as Facebook groups and Twitter lists. "They started a Facebook

group to talk about the game a little bit," Nelson recalls, "They were trash talking each other

on there, but in a smart, informed way, which is super cool. It seemed to be more in their

zone, their zone for learning."

Indeed, the idea of the "zone,"

applies to teaching as much as it

does to sports. In fact, so-called

competitive fandom has been

shown to facilitate learning. A

study conducted by researchers at

the University of Wisconsin-

Madison, for example, explored

how online fantasy baseball-like

programs could lead to

more-impactful learning

experiences in other fields. The


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system (one in which you want to

earn points and win) encourages

players to engage with a large

body of content (e.g., news,

analysis and statistics) and use that

knowledge to their competitive

advantage.

Though it's still too early to quantify

just how much Fantasy Geopolitics

can improve academic

performance, there's more than

enough anecdotal evidence to

prove its worth. Nelson, for

instance, says he's noticed an

uptick in test scores. Meanwhile,

Huesken was pleased to see

students in his history classes making connections between historical details and current

events in papers and on tests. At the very least, it helps trap wandering minds: "I often use [it]

during prom season," says Stephanie Pearson, head of the Contemporary Studies

Department at Holy Trinity Catholic High School in Ontario, Canada. "It's a sly way to keep

students on task."

Nelson has seen enough to feel confident that his platform has the makings of a powerful

learning tool, and so has left teaching to pursue expanding the business and building out the

platform even further. Some of the first updates will be simple; the team is starting to roll out

an embedded messaging tool, for example, and they're planning to bake in the ability to set

up playoffs and tournaments.

But Nelson's vision is more global than that -- literally. Heeding feedback from teachers like

Huesken, the site will soon allow for inter-school competitions, which could let leagues

across the world from one another compete and collaborate. (There are already teachers

using the platform as far away as Spain and Australia.) These collaborations could allow

Fantasy Geopolitics developers to format the games around world events, such as the

Olympics, and integrate more deeply with videoconferencing tools like Skype and Google

Hangouts.


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A trade in progress.

An app is also in the works, but Nelson first wants to focus on adapting the tools he's built for

other civics and social-studies lessons. For instance, he's considering developing a US

edition for the 2016 presidential election, which will help better convey the Electoral College

and process.

Regardless of the subject matter, Nelson believes the software has the unique ability to

empower students in the learning process. "Rather than me being the source of knowledge,

my students manage their own learning, just like they manage their team," he explains.

"[Fantasy Geopolitics] encourages a reimagining of the way learning and curiosity actually

works -- a student now owns it, and manages it, and wants to do it."

[Images credits: Stephanie Pearson (top) Fantasy Geopolitics/Eric Nelson (screenshots)]

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forget football: how fantasy sports are helping kids learn

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