Austin Scholar #86: esports Academy: A game-changing approach to schooling
& what I’ve been reading
Hey, y'all!
This week from Austin Scholar...
esports Academy: A game-changing approach to schooling
Scholar’s Sources: What I’ve been reading
esports Academy: A game-changing approach to schooling
One of the fun (but sometimes stressful) things about being at Alpha is that you’re pretty much part of a startup school.
And while I’ve never been to Silicon Valley, the highs and lows of being a student at Alpha seem similar to those of being a startup founder.
It’s been a startup since day one, but now my classmates and I are spending the next few months actually being a part of the founding team for a brand new school. At the end of the year, we’ll be launching esports Academy. I’m super excited about esports Academy because it gives a new example of how a multitude of the ideas we’ve pioneered at Alpha can revolutionize education.
Let me dive into our business plan:
First, who’s our target customer? Fifth to eighth graders who love video gaming. There are millions of these kids, and many of them struggle in school and isolate themselves socially.
Next, what is the product we’re proposing? Well, with the invention of 2 Hour Learning, we can create a school that dramatically improves students' academic outcomes, their development of life skills, their interaction with both the physical and online worlds, and their overall happiness. esports Academy can deliver all these things because it uses a student's natural passion (gaming!) to drive their education.
We have designed a school that harnesses gamer kids’ interests, then helps them "level up" and get ready for high school and life beyond video games. They will become academic stars, learn valuable life and social skills, and have the best time of their life while doing it.
How do we do this? We harness their primary motivation, video games, to teach them the academic and life skills they need.
Instead of spending six hours per day in a standard classroom where they are bored or disengaged, students at esports Academy spend two hours per day on academics–with an AI tutor that dramatically accelerates their learning. This AI tutor has proven results that allow kids to learn two to five times faster than standard school.
In return for spending two hours per day with the AI tutor, students then get their afternoons to participate in esports practices and tournaments. Each student will be a member of a team that is striving for a national eSports championship.
In building the school, we had to answer the question: what is our guarantee to the kids? We decided to use the Alpha three commitment structure that we know so well.
Kids will love school
While this is often hard for schools to deliver on, this should be pretty easy for us. After all, we’re building a school around video games for kids who love video games.
But parents probably wouldn’t be super excited to send their kids to a school where they play video games all day, no matter how much their kids want to go.
Which brings me to commitment number two:
Kids entering esports Academy in the lower 50% of academic rankings nationwide will rise to the top 10% within two years
While no standard school will make this guarantee, everyone at Alpha knows that for a motivated student using 2 Hour Learning, this is easy.
But academics still aren’t enough. To prepare kids for the real world, they can't just be good at math and playing games. And even if kids don't care about academics, they do care about learning socialization skills.
The official title for this socialization commitment is still in the works, but as of now, it’s colloquially called:
Get ready for the Westlake cafeteria
My classmates and I have all noticed that even though everyone wants socialization skills, schools don’t directly teach them. They just make you experience socialization by throwing you into the deep end. And in Austin, the “deep end” is the Westlake High School cafeteria – hence our working title. (Basically, it’s like the high school from Mean Girls.)
In a world that throws kids into the socialization deep end, we’re going to make sure that esports Academy graduates know how to swim.
Once you have a new school, you have to market it.
I have to admit, I don’t know anything about gaming. But, my gamer classmates made a list of esports celebrities, and we’ve been reaching out to them in order to see if they’re willing to help.
We’ve received some responses, and we believe that with their endorsements, there will be a thousand applicants for every available spot in esports Academy.
I’m in charge of admissions, so my job is to filter through those thousands of applicants to make sure that this isn’t a school for slackers who just want to play games all day. It’s a school that uses gaming to motivate kids to do great things, and we need to select students accordingly. So, I’m creating a super challenging ten-step admissions process that most parents will think their fifth-to-eighth grader has no chance of completing.
This will have two main benefits:
We will be able to find the kids that will excel at esports Academy.
This will convince parents that their child is capable of incredible things – when they’re properly motivated. (Parents: if you have any impossible tasks you would want on this ten-step list, send them over.)
We’re also, as you may have guessed after reading some of my previous newsletters, using AI to help us build things at esports Academy – including my admissions process. Our phrase at Alpha is that if you’re using AI during 2 Hour Learning, you’re probably cheating; if you’re not using AI during afternoon workshops, you’re probably failing.
I used AI to help me build out the ten-step admissions process. Here’s the prompt I used:
I'm in charge of admissions and need to create a super hard, 10-step admissions process for 5-8th graders that most parents think is impossible for their kid. I'm trying to filter for ambitious and hard-working kids and show parents that their kid is limitless if properly motivated. Can you help me come up with the 10 steps?
(Also, I usually send this prompt to two AIs so I can take the answer I liked best.)
Here are the results:
And, while writing this newsletter, I also used AI to create some promotional blog posts for esports Academy. Here they are:
I’ll keep you up-to-date on how we’re doing in the weeks ahead. For any parent who has a fifth-to-eighth-grade gamer, I’d love to schedule a call with you to learn what you would want in a school optimized for your kid.
Scholar’s Sources: What I’ve been reading
This week was a break week at school, so I had some extra time for reading. Here are a few of my favorites from this week:
The Unsinkable Melanie Perkins: After 100 Rejections, the Canva CEO Faces Her Greatest Threat Yet
Ethan Mollick: What people ask me most. Also, some answers.
2023 MLB playoffs highlights: D-backs heading to NLCS after Dodgers sweep, Astros to the ALCS
I know this isn’t an article, but I’ve been having the time of my life with this New York Times game: Connections
Thanks for reading. Go crush the week! See y'all on Sunday.