BALTIMORE — Attendance has fallen off a Cliff for a lot of schools in Baltimore City since the pandemic started.
EliteGamingLIVE has cracked the code to get some kids back in the virtual classrooms.
Let’s look at reaching kids as a strategy based video game.
The object or puzzle is to have students want to learn something and be able to apply it to life.
So you take something they enjoy like playing Madden, Fifa or Super Smash Bros— and bring it into the curriculum.
Besides what they are learning by being part of a team environment and all the strategy that goes into gaming—EliteGamingLIVE shows them how they can transfer their love of gaming as consumers into careers in creation.
“Audio engineering is one, sound design, game programming, game production, we’ve even got writing and storytelling, analytics, we’re adding cyber security, we’ve got cloud engineering,” said Kerwin Rent.
Rent is the founder of the company, and he says it was born out of his lifelong love with gaming.
He saw opportunity in the sports based approach to gaming.
“It’s important that we engage those kids how we’ve been engaging sports kids for the past 40-50 years. These are the kids who build the zoom that we are on right now. These are the kids who design the IPhone. These are the kids who build all the stuff we use in our everyday lives.”
You can’t reach the final levels of the EGL program without learning about the stem careers attached to the games.
For the students who grind hard in the classroom—they get the chance to play in the championships at the end of the season to win cash prizes, scholarships, and trophies.
“You’re building these skill sets, and these features, and these intangibles in a group of kids who typically don’t have any type of adult supervision or structure around how they are learning them,” said Rent. “If I slam my helmet down on a football field my dad might say “hey I saw you slam your helmet tell me what that was about so we can talk about it.
Over 90 percent of kids already play video games.
When they log on with this program there’s coaches in the room with them.
“Gamers are in this world where adults don’t have that vision to kind of course correct negative emotional responses. It’s really important you have adults in the room, and EGL is the room. “
Reginald F. Lewis High School has seen a steep decline in attendance since going virtual.
“Beginning of this year the end of last year kids weren’t showing up,” said Dionte Holland. “Point blank, nothing else to say about it.”
Dionte Holland normally coaches lacrosse and football at Reginald F. Lewis and he also oversees attendance.
He said he’s not much of a gamer anymore, but what he is a passionate educator who jumped at the opportunity to partner with EliteGamingLIVE as a coach.
“They weren’t showing up and once this was announced to us we reached out to a couple of students who weren’t coming to school at all,” Holland said. “They’re starting to come to school just because they know they have an opportunity to compete other schools in the city and they have to have the grades and good attendance to participate.”
Reginald F Lewis hasn’t started the program yet but as coach Holland said curious kids are already heading back to school because of this opportunity.
He’s putting a team together now— targeting the kids in the lunchroom who were always playing games at lunch time who haven’t been showing up.
I’m excited to follow up on this story in a few months to see how their skills with the sticks have improved and more importantly the impact it’s having on their grades.
The good news is you can sign your kid up to be a part of this individually as well and they will be put on a team.
To learn more click here.
