Esports Discourse Enters Curriculum: Can It Improve Critical Reasoning?

Illustration (Unsplash/Florian Olivio)

JAKARTA - Recently, the discourse of incorporating esports into the school curriculum has become a topic of discussion. The issue spread in the midst of designing a new curriculum by the Ministry of Education and Culture (Kemendikbud) which will prioritize critical reasoning skills.

The Indonesian Esports Executive Board (PBESI) intends to include esports in the school curriculum. Later, esports will be included in school extracurricular activities at the junior high, high school and vocational school levels. "Esports is also included in the vocational school curriculum," said Ashadi Ang in the webinar "Building Career Paths for Esports Athletes & National Achievements," Wednesday, November 24.

Ashadi said that esports at the education level can be used as a forum for potential development. In addition, according to him, providing basic materials as a foundation for education about the world of esports, can be done so that students have the right mindset.

"We want to provide an education from an early age... This means, when we talk about esports, this is an ecosystem of this size, the opportunity is this big, and the foundations of what to do and not to do in order to become a successful athlete," said Ashadi.

Ashadi said, the components in esports are broad. Not only professional players, but also casters or commentators. PBESI's intention will be conveyed to the Ministry of Education and Culture and the Ministry of Youth and Sports (Kemenpora) before it can be implemented.

Illustration (Unsplash/Ella Don)

Flexible curriculum

Elsewhere, the Head of the Educational Standards, Curriculum and Assessment Agency, Nino Aditomo, said that claims of esports to be used as a curriculum were not licensed. Even though the Ministry of Education and Culture is currently designing a new curriculum mentioned by the Minister of Education and Culture on National Teacher's Day.

The curriculum in question is planned to be made more flexible and tailored to the needs of students. "We follow the design principle of less is more. In principle, the curriculum that is created should only lock the essential things. The goal is to provide a large space for schools to design their own curriculum," said Nino via his Twitter account, @ninoaditomo.

Nino explained that the Ministry of Education and Culture would prioritize critical reasoning skills. "This includes the ability to search for, analyze, and evaluate information and ideas. Also the metacognitive ability to reflect, evaluate, and revise one's own thinking."

So the most important thing according to him is providing literacy that is more than esports. The curriculum framework that the Ministry of Education and Culture wants to change is that schools are able to develop their learning materials and methods.

Yesterday there was news that e-sports would be included in the school curriculum. But is it true?

— Nino Aditomo (@ninoaditomo) November 26, 2021

For this reason, it is possible that esports can also be included as content for school curriculum development as long as it increases critical reasoning. "Specific content such as esports can be used by schools as part of their curriculum. What is important is that these materials are used to develop essential skills such as critical reasoning, creativity, and mutual cooperation." So can esports improve critical thinking?

Esports today

The development of esports in Southeast Asia is indeed significant. Asiasoft, for example, this online game operator, noted that they already have 40 million IDs in Southeast Asia from the 28 types of games they publish.

Another indicator of the rapid development of esports is becoming one of the sports that are competed at the 2018 Asian Games. The determination of esports as a sport has been agreed by the Asian Olympic Sports Institute (Olympic Council of Asia / OCA) since April 17, 2017.

If in the past a digital game was more familiarly called a video game, now that has changed. The special term used to refer to video games is now more familiar as esports or if translated into Indonesian, namely Electronic Sports.

Fadillah Kurniawan in the Journal of Sports Achievement (2019) defines esports as a sports field that uses games as the main competitive field. Meanwhile, Reza Wahyudi (2017) further explained that esports is a digital sport that is organized with special training, such as professional athletes in football, badminton, or basketball.

Esports is currently growing rapidly in Indonesia. It is evident from several Indonesian esports teams that are quite bright in international circles. Call it the Recca eSport, NXL, or CS:GO team which often wins in prestigious eSport tournaments, both nationally and internationally.

Indeed, the categorization of esports into sports is still a matter of debate. According to Fadillah, the use of the term "sport" always raises various arguments because of the many different interpretations of sport. And one of the strongest arguments for calling esports a sport according to Fadil is by looking at the number of spectators during the match.

Illustration (Unsplash/Ed Us)

Fadillah noted that at the Dota 2 world championship in 2019, at least 20 million people had watched it. Then in the League of Legends (LoL) game championship, there were 27 million who watched the final match and 11.2 million people watched it live. "You could say esports has become mainstream," he wrote. Then back to the core question, is there any effect of esports on students' academic abilities?

The influence of esports

One of the studies on the influence of esports on learning achievement was made by Khairul Azwar and Mailindawati. The research was published in the Visipena Journal in December 2020.

Khairul and Mailindawati conducted the research in Lhokseumawe City, Aceh. They collected 150 students who were in SMPN 2, SMAN 1, and SMKN 2 Lhokseumawe City as research subjects.

The study showed that 56 respondents who were intense in playing esports had a poor learning achievement index of 68.6 percent. "And of the 24 respondents whose playing intensity was low, most of them had a good learning achievement index, which was 23.8 percent," he wrote.

In addition, the survey also shows that esports can increase students' emotions. "The 56 respondents who played high intensity esports games mostly had a high emotional level, which was 70.7 percent," wrote Khairul and Mailindawati.

"The results obtained are that online games have an impact on disrupted student teaching and learning activities. This is because they like online games more, lack enthusiasm in the learning process, pay less attention to what the teacher explains, and the desire to answer questions from the teacher is very minimal."

Khairul and Mailindawati said that their research supports similar research conducted by Rocky Sainaqri (2014) on "The Effect of Online Game Playing on Student Learning Activities in Class VIII SMP Negeri 1 Jatiroto, Wonogiri Regency" and Fernandor (2018) about the relationship between playing online games and social and behavioral behavior. learning achievement.

*Read other information about EDUCATION read another interesting article from Ramdan Febrian Arifin.

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