Last year I started a 6th grade esports club and we got off to a great start before the pandemic closed our schools. A group of kids in the club remained active during the spring. I expected more to be able to participate because the nice thing about esports is that we don’t have to be in the same place to all play together at the same time. That is the beauty of online gaming. There are many Minecraft Java servers that we could join together to play at the same time and using Minecraft Education Edition any one of us with decent bandwidth can host a world that everyone can join. We learned that hosting a world for others to join was much easier when we’re all in the room, on the same network, while more difficult but not impossible to do from all our homes. Joining a Minecraft Education Edition world from different homes using different Wifi networks was problematic but often worked pretty well.
So this year I asked 6th graders if they wanted to join our esports club and I got a small group of kids who were interested and signed up. We started with eight kids and now have 13, almost 14 kids. Most of the kids who joined at first were from Cohorts A and B, the kids who could come to school two days a week, but in the end four kids from the remote-only cohort managed to join the club.
Last year I was able to have our club meetings a couple days a week before school started at 7 am. With bus runs carefully scheduled to avoid mixing kids in different cohorts and keeping kids apart, having kids come to school early was not an option this year so I was able to schedule meetings virtually one day a week on Wednesdays at 11 am. We met via Google Meet and would play Minecraft Java Edition.
This year we joined the 2020 Fall CompMC League, which started in October. Being part of the league gave me access to launch a private Minecraft Java Server for my kids to play by themselves, which made it perfect for having team practices! Without our own private server we would join servers with other people and just have to play with whomever was on. It was fun and we were technically playing “together” but not in a way where we could form teams and practice our strategy. Another benefit of using the CompMC private server is that we could practice on the exact same maps where we would be playing! This allowed my teams to play together in a way that allowed us to practice how they could play on game day!
Here’s a video I live streamed of one of the games we played this season:
I live stream practices and games on my Twitch channel. The CompMC league tournament gave us something to focus on so the goal of all our meetings this year was to prepare, practice, and compete in the league tournament. Coaching for me was something I could handle because my responsibilities included communicating with CompMC on their Discord channel and re-scheduling matches with the other coaches. CompMC put together a series of videos showing students how to play, which was excellent since I can’t play Minecraft anywhere near as well as my students can. They are experts and I’m a total noob (beginner). The kids picked up the gameplay for Capture the Wool (CTW) very quickly and became adept in no time. I also have one student whose natural leadership skills, love of Minecraft, and dedication to the club and the tournament made him not only the obvious perfect choice for team captain but also for assistant coach (I never called him assistant coach but he really was and is).
The timing of the fall tournament did not coincide well with our school year. We didn’t even have our team set up by the time the first game started so we missed the first game and had to forfeit staring the tournament at 0-1. We were slated to play west coast teams to make scheduling games easier so we played against two teams from the Orange County School of the Arts and three teams from Lakeside Middle School, both schools from California. After forfeiting our first game and not having any time to practice before our second game, my students learned how to play by playing against teams that already knew how to play. We lost game after game learning along the way. My kids learned quickly and by the end of it they were playing very well and we ended the season 1-5. Needless the say, my kids are ready for the next tournament and they are looking forward to it!
CTW games on CompMC are played on some amazing maps with teams of 5 vs 5. I almost had enough kids to make three teams and could have easily made two teams but it would not have worked because even with 13 kids I could barely get five at a time to play the games against the Orange County and Lakeside teams! I would have to choose teams of seven kids just to make a team of five as kids would say they were going to play and either not show up, show up late, or play on a laptop not plugged in and have their computer die in the middle of a game. We had to lose one match with only four players because of a student not having her charger nearby! That is the hardest part of running an esports club remotely during a pandemic, at least for me, because when we had esports last year, students actually showed up to school ready to play in class. Having students remember they agreed to play a game Tuesday at 4 pm proved to be too difficult for many of my 6th grader club kids.
For our next season tournament, I would love to have three teams compete but I know better. I don’t even think I can successfully have two teams of five without having to forfeit some games. I will leave it up to the kids in the club though.
For those students who preferred to work cooperatively and build instead of play the Player vs Player (PVP) game of CTW, we also had the choice of competing in the NASEF Minecraft Rube Goldberg Machine building contest (still going on btw)! This contest is amazingly well put together! Kids who joined the contest from the start have been practicing their Rube Goldberg machine building skills in Minecraft by completing smaller contests comprising of each of the six simple machines. They finished working on the last of the six simple machines last week and when we return in January participants will complete in the final complete Rube Goldberg Machine build! The hosts of the contest live streamed the twice a month mini contest kickoff showing how to build each of the six simple machine in Minecraft and awarding contestants prizes for submitting their final builds on Flipgrid! They even had Rube Goldberg’s very own granddaughter as one of the co-hosts on the live streams!
Simply amazingly brilliant.
I have one girl in the club who only competed in this event only and four other students who are competing in both this event and the CompMC CTW tournament. So esports is going rather well considering everything that is going on in our world.
