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An ever-growing number of educators are embracing the concept of esports and understanding the various benefits, but many are still unsure about precisely how to build a successful esports program in high school. Ultimately, a successful program will rely on many things, including an appropriate curriculum, the right goals, good recruitment, and the provision of high-quality equipment.
Read on to learn more about how to establish a successful high school esports program. If you already have an esports team at your school, you can check out ViewSonic ELITE’s gaming monitors.
Competitive video game playing, or esports, is playing an increasingly important role within academic settings and if you are looking to embrace it, it is important to understand how to build a successful esports program in high school. Typically, this means establishing an esports club and creating a curriculum of sorts.
The best high school esports clubs will have clear goals, facilitate skills development, and have appropriate budget management too. Beyond this, esports is becoming a viable career path too and high school esports teams need to assist students in exploring possibilities in this area as well.
In this article, we explain the various steps required to build a successful program.
The first step if you are looking to build a successful esports program in high school is to start an esports club. Some key preliminary activities here will likely include deciding on a time and place for the club to meet and speaking to senior decision-makers at the school about the many potential benefits associated with esports.
For example, much like traditional sports, esports can help to teach important life skills, such as teamwork, strategic thinking, and the ability to persevere to overcome adversity. It can also help to provide valuable time for students to socialize and take part in an activity they enjoy outside of the usual school hours.
Your club should be as inclusive and accessible as possible and you should look to recruit members who are enthusiastic about competitive gaming, but also willing to put the time and effort in. While this competitive element is extremely important, it is also essential to remember that the club should be fun for all involved.
The next step is to make several important decisions about the esports club. For example, you are going to want to come up with an esports team name and you will also need to think about how to spread the word about the club to attract new participants. You might need to think about joining an esports association too.
Beyond this, there are several key questions you will need to answer. Who are you going to compete against? When will you have these competitions? What games are you going to focus on?
Consideration needs to be given to fundraising and budget management. How are you going to pay for the equipment needed? It may be possible to acquire funding from senior decision-makers at the school, but if this proves difficult you might need to think about other options, such as membership fees or fundraising events.
For the next stage in the process, you are going to need to start thinking about creating a curriculum or providing club members with some kind of structure or framework. After all, to get the most from the club, students cannot simply be left to their own devices to play video games like they would at home.
A sensible starting point here is to think about some broad aims and objectives for the esports club. What are you hoping to achieve through the club? Success in esports competitions is a legitimate aim, but you should also think about other rewards, especially with esports scholarships available from major colleges and universities.
Try to think about valuable life lessons that can be taught using video games too. Put aside time for theoretical and strategic lessons, as well as practical gaming sessions. If you treat the club with care and provide a real structure for members, you can maximize the benefits for all the students who join.
To give your club the best possible chance of actually being competitive, you are also going to need to provide the right equipment. This will include finding good gaming computers and monitors, but also various gaming accessories.
You are going to need to invest in desks and chairs for the club to use and these need to benefit from ergonomic design. Students need to sit at an appropriate distance from the screen to avoid eye strain, and you may also need to think about both function and comfort when it comes to things like headsets and controllers too.
Failure to provide the right equipment and setup can result in your esports club being at a competitive disadvantage due to issues like frame rate drops or even physical discomfort. With that being said, the balancing act here is providing the best possible equipment, without exceeding the budget available to the club.
Once you have the right esports setup in place, you need to think about actually playing some games. You can find opponents from other schools and the great thing about online gaming is these schools do not even have to be in the nearby area. All you need to do is find opponents who can play when your club plays.
The precise games you opt to focus on will depend on several factors, including the individual preferences of club members, which games are popular at the time, and which games you can find opponents for. However, ideally, you should try to offer a variety of genres: first-person shooters, multiplayer battle arena games, driving games, and so on.
Ultimately, the simple act of playing video games will be at the very heart of any esports club. It is also only through this process that you can start to think of the final phase, where you start to help students to develop their skills and improve in the areas to win more games.
The last step involves your esports club providing valuable competition training, which should be geared towards getting the participants ready for any future gaming tournaments. Training can be as simple as providing time for students to play their chosen games, but theoretical lessons are perfectly possible too.
For example, resources like Twitch have an abundance of video game and esports content and it should be relatively simple to find tips and tricks for most popular games. You may also need to work with students on an individual level, helping them to address their weaknesses and harness their strengths.
Another good tip here is to use footage from previous sessions, so that club members can identify plus points and areas for improvements, such as mistakes that have been made, or bad habits that need to be addressed.
To build a successful esports program in high school, you need more than just club members and the right equipment. While playing video games should be fun, one of the key aims of esports in academic settings should still be to teach students valuable lessons and help them develop useful life skills.
For this reason, a major focus should be placed on providing some form of structure to the club, with sessions for competition training and others for broader lessons that can be taught through the medium of video games. When this is achieved, the esports club can start to have a long-lasting positive influence on the school.
To further the success of your esports team, it is essential to make sure that you have quality gaming equipment to gain a competitive advantage. Read our complete guide of an esports setup here or discover our collection of professional and casual gaming monitors here.
The esports vs sports comparison has become increasingly relevant in education settings, as schools and other academic institutions become more familiar with the concept of esports and start to gain a better understanding of the various ways it can benefit learners.
Read on to find out more about esports and traditional sports, and how they compare and contrast. Or discover ViewSonic ELITE’s range of esports equipment.
The rise of esports within academic settings has led to inevitable esports vs sports comparisons, with educators weighing up the benefits of competitive video game playing compared to the more traditional competitive sporting activities often taught in schools, such as football, basketball, hockey, and gymnastics.
There is a significant crossover between esports and sports, to the extent that there is also a real debate about whether esports should be considered a sport in its own right. However, there are some significant differences too and these differences need to be fully understood.
In this article, we will compare and contrast esports and traditional sports, and explain why you should encourage students to take up competitive gaming and create their esports team.
Before getting into the esports vs sports comparison, it is first important to establish precisely what we mean by esports. The term itself is short for ‘electronic sports’ and refers to competitive video game playing. Dictionary.com currently defines the concept as “competitive tournaments of video games”, while other sources refer to organized competitions between video game players or teams of video gamers.
A broad range of video game types can be used for esports purposes. First-person shooting games are a common example, but esports competitions and tournaments may also use fighting games, sports games, real-time strategy games, battle royale-style games, racing games, and more.
Within schools and other educational settings, the main obstacles to establishing an esports team are buy-in at the senior level, and the need for investment in the required equipment, including gaming computers and headsets. Yet, more and more schools are starting to see the benefits of esports and are now actively encouraging students to participate.
When attempting to understand the esports phenomenon, it’s crucial to look at the benefits it can provide students. As covered in a previous article, the benefits of high school esports are numerous, helping to teach crucial life skills, like preparation, goal setting, strategic thinking, and teamwork, which can serve students throughout their lives.
Esports can help students develop their social skills and can be a valuable extracurricular activity to engage with. Additionally, the rise of professional esports means it is an increasingly viable career path too.
In fact, in recent times there have even been attempts to legitimize esports by gaining Olympic Games recognition. In 2017, the International Olympic Committee concluded that esports “could be considered as a sporting activity, and the players involved prepare and train with an intensity which may be comparable to athletes in traditional sports.”
For any esports vs sports comparison to be useful, it is important to take a closer look at what traditional sporting activities provide students in terms of benefits too. The most immediately apparent area where traditional sports offer a benefit that esports cannot is physical activity and exertion.
Traditional sports help with character-building, teach students to handle their emotions, develop self-confidence, and learn discipline, perseverance, and patience. At the same time, sports can teach leadership skills and can boost overall enjoyment in education, which is vital for student engagement.
Beyond this, the physical movement associated with traditional sports provides a variety of health benefits, ranging from greater cardiovascular fitness and reduced risk of obesity and related illnesses, through to mental health benefits and a reduced chance of developing issues associated with sleeping habits.
However, there are some limitations to traditional sports too. One of the biggest problems that have been identified with sports in academic settings is the disproportionate attention given to more athletic students, who are already good at the sport in question when compared to those who are less athletic or new to the sport.
This can then lead to disengagement, where certain students are left behind. Feelings of exclusion and isolation are common among those who do not feel they are particularly good at the sport being played. The risk of injury is also a relevant concern, especially with contact sports.
There are also issues with how inclusive many traditional sports are. Differently-abled students, for example, are often unable to participate unless adaptations are made and some teachers are ill-equipped to make the necessary adjustments to lessons, resulting in a lack of opportunity to take part.
When you consider both the positives and negatives of traditional sports, the esports vs sports argument becomes more interesting. There are some benefits associated with traditional sports that esports cannot offer. However, one of the big plus points of having organized esports in schools is the inclusiveness it can provide.
Compared to traditional sporting activities, making adaptations to esports equipment to enable everyone to participate is relatively easy and video game developers are continually improving the accessibility of their games too, including thorough features like subtitles, motion controls, and compatibility with adapted game controllers.
At the same time, esports offers many of the same benefits as traditional sports too. The ability to work as part of a team can be developed through multiplayer strategy games in much the same way as it can be developed through team sports. The same is also true for learning things like patience, trial and error, and the importance of strategy.
Aside from understanding the benefits of esports in academic settings, one of the biggest obstacles is getting key decision-makers to invest in the right equipment. After all, for an esports team to become competitive against other schools’ teams, this investment is going to be critical.
When it comes to gaming PCs, you need to think about whether a laptop or desktop will be better. Generally, for performance, desktop computers are ideal, but high-end gaming laptops do offer the benefit of portability. Similarly, with headsets, there are considerations such as wireless vs wired and whether to opt for a built-in microphone. Our complete guide to the best esports setup includes a lot of additional information that can help you to find the right equipment.
Away from this area, the esports team at your school must be as inclusive as possible. While esports is competitive, the real value comes from students learning vital life skills while having fun, so try to make sure this sense of fun is at the heart of everything the esports team does.
The growing popularity of esports and ongoing efforts to has it recognized as a legitimate sport has helped to ignite the esports vs sports debate and get schools to think about how the two concepts compare. This debate is especially important in these academic settings because students stand to benefit from participation.
While it is fair to say that traditional sports do still offer advantages over esports in terms of physical activity, esports teach many of the same skills and life lessons, from developing teamwork and strategic thinking to learning the importance of patience and overcoming defeat. Combined with the accessibility it can offer, this makes it hugely valuable within schools and suggests esports teams should be actively encouraged and supported.
If you are keen on starting an esports team at your high school, read our complete guide on steps to take. To deck out your esports club room, check out ViewSonic ELITE’s range of gaming monitors.
Ever wondered why films look so otherworldly? Making a place appear like the backdrop is Mars or an eerie haunted house is true movie magic at work. To set the tone and mood of such a visual spectacle, color correction and color grading are crucial. But what’s the difference between the two?
Read on to know the difference between color correction and color grading, or find out more about ViewSonic ColorPro professional-grade monitors.
Color is often used by movie directors and photographers to establish a certain style or ambiance. Footage or raw images caught on cameras don’t necessarily translate onto the screens accurately and perfectly. Color correction and color grading are used in the editing process to adjust color to its best viewing experience.
Color correction and color grading have often been used loosely for each other. But they are two separate processes in video or photo editing. To understand the difference between color correction and color grading, we need to realize that they are both parts of a technical process in post-production. Color correction is usually done before color grading.
Color correction is a technical process that adjusts hue, saturation, and brightness to bring overall color in line with the human eye. It brings consistency across the footage and corrects any technical color errors.
There are some simple ways to correct color on a basic level. Do keep in mind that every adjustment in each step affects one another, so you will have to go back to earlier steps to make the necessary changes.
White balance is a process to attain a true white in an image or video so that all the other colors fall in the right areas. Light ranges from warm to cool tones, so adjusting the white balance is about changing the temperature and tint by adding more warmness or coolness. A curves application is usually utilized to fine-tune white, grey, and black levels in post-production.
Exposure is the measure of how bright or dark the footage or photo is. To set it at its proper exposure, adjust levels of brightness, contrast, highlights, shadows, whites, and blacks. Using curves
This tool allows you to have control over hue, saturation, brightness, and contrast within one interface. It’s an efficient way to experiment with different looks for your footage by dragging a point within each color wheel. The three wheels control either highlights, mid-tones, or shadows of your video.
Color grading is an artistic process of adjusting color in a photo or video to create a stylized tone and mood. It sets the final look and feel of a film or portrait. Color grading is usually done after color correction.
The process of color grading is about adding color information on top of existing color values, and not changing them.
Split toning is a quick way to apply a specific color onto the lights and darks of an image or video, without affecting brightness or amounts of shadows and whites. This allows one color to be added to a certain highlighted area and another to a darker one. For example, you can change the tone of the image without affecting skin tones.
The simplest way to implement split toning is to adjust hue and saturation within highlights and shadows. You will also need to use the balance feature to qualify which brightness levels are shadows or highlights – this brings more precision to split-tone adjustments.
Scopes make sure the edited colors are translated across different screens correctly. There is no point in spending time and effort color-grading footage and then having the video look entirely different on someone else’s screen. Scopes present the true levels of exposure, color balance, and saturation, making sure that each shot matches visually and colors are broadcast-safe.
There are four primary video scopes to use:
LUTs (Lookup tables) are preset color filters used to alter the colors of videos or photos. They adjust levels of gamma, saturation, luminance, contrast, and hue automatically. LUTs contain saved information that can be applied to every single footage and image all at once. They are useful and convenient tools for enhancing color correction and color grading work.
There are about six types of LUTs, and they serve different purposes.
LUTs can be created and applied to different formats such as LOG, RAW, Rec. 709, Rec. 2020, HDR, and more. Generally, colorists use the log normalization LUT as a starting point before starting the color correction process. Once the proper color correction is completed, they would move on to the color grading phase and import a LUT pack onto their footage. As the pack contains pre-determined values, it will apply the desired look to the film or photo all at once.
Color correction and color grading are essential processes that take movies and photoshoots from their raw beauty to vivid, spectacular worlds. And they require a monitor that can convey as many shades of color in the truest precision as possible. A professional-level monitor that is pre-calibrated will ensure that your vision will be conveyed accurately.
To know more about choosing the right monitor for photo or video editing, you can read about it here. Or discover ViewSonic ColorPro™ professional monitors here.
Wireless Presentation Displays (WPDs) can help your team create, communicate, and connect in a hybrid work setting. As part of collaboration spaces, WPDs are effective front-of-the-room screens that cut down on connectivity issues and make it easy to share content in person or remotely.
If you would like to learn more about optimizing wireless presentations, you can learn more about ViewSonic’s solutions here.
The concept of remote work is not new in this globalized world. An increasing number of people are working across borders and time zones. As companies confront the realities of a new normal, many have transitioned to a hybrid work model that demands increased flexibility from both people and technology in the workplace.
Hybrid work combines remote work and time in the office. It gives employees the flexibility to switch between working from home for individual tasks and the office for face-to-face meetings.
This new arrangement also affects the way companies create, collaborate, and communicate. There is a need to embrace innovative approaches and smart technology to navigate this emerging working environment. The last thing businesses want is productivity and efficiency to fall due to a lack of proper digital infrastructure.
Wireless presentation displays are an ideal way to conduct physical and virtual meetings in a changing environment. The budget- and user-friendly device transforms conference rooms into reservoirs of ideas, where on-site and remote workers can brainstorm and participate effortlessly.
Also referred to as WPDs, wireless presentation displays are high-quality flat-panel displays with built-in videoconferencing capabilities, wireless connectivity, screen sharing, and other multimedia display functions. They provide a gateway for companies to better adapt to a hybrid workforce in a virtual space with a single integrated device.
Meetings are a mainstay in corporate culture. They help align project progress, enable new ideas, and build team cohesion. However, they come with a myriad of challenges. From a lack of structure to poor time management, bad meetings can drain precious time and energy.
Executing a better meeting can be achieved with the aid of wireless presentation displays. The device rethinks how to have meetings, whether in a single location or dispersed across the globe.
Clear communication is essential for the success of any company. A breakdown can impede productivity, create a stressful work environment and even, cause projects to fall through. With the shift towards a hybrid workforce, virtual communication breakdowns can be a potential problem.
WPDs bring all participants, whether in the office or remotely, together in one virtual location seamlessly. It provides brilliant image quality and high-fidelity sound for effective collaborations. Discussions can be heard crystal clear, and fewer visual cues lost through pixels.
These user-friendly displays have the ability to split into multiple screens. This provides ample virtual space to feature graphs and data for comparison, allowing teams to become more productive and make better decisions.
Bad meetings often relegate some participants to the backseat. It reduces the employees’ sense of commitment and discourages them from sharing ideas. WPDs are a great way to engage and empower all participants to be part of the collaboration.
They allow participants to connect wirelessly and seamlessly from any location, without interrupting the presentation or using multiple cables. Equipped with added video conferencing features, each worker can be seen and heard clearly. They can even cast content from their devices onto the display, transforming the simple meeting into a communications hub.
The uptake of hybrid work structures means paperwork must be digitized and massive content to be shared. It will require a robust WiFi connection, secure cloud storage, and a user-friendly interface. WPDs smooth content-heavy workflows and improves productivity in a mixed office environment.
Time often translates to money in an economy. Wasted time due to inefficient business operations can lead to high costs and unproductive employees. Wireless presentation displays can help streamline time-consuming setups and reduce redundant applications.
Employees can easily access and share documents and multimedia from a secure cloud management system. Multiple users can also simultaneously stream, edit and transfer their content on the display in real-time. There is less time wasted on tracking down files and more for high-level assignments.
As workforces continue to evolve, companies need to reimagine conference spaces and adopt smart digital conferencing solutions. Offices of the future will have to support mixed working arrangements and physical distancing without compromising communication and productivity. Wireless presentation displays are an indispensable tool to adjust employees to a virtual setting and ensure that offices are future-ready.
In an ever-changing landscape, businesses face constant risks and uncertainties. Wireless presentation displays are a cost-effective way to better equip your company and workforce for a rapidly evolving future.
Choosing the best presentation display for your business is a valuable investment in the long run. Learn more about the types of digital conferencing solutions available here. Or find out about ViewSonic’s Wireless Presentation Displays for businesses here.