Assessing esport candidacy for critical thinking education

Abstract

Critical thinking in education is mainstream with ever increasing industry support for soft skills and capacity for graduates to solve problems, plan strategy, make decisions and communicate creatively. However, teaching and assessing critical thinking is resource intensive especially when scaling to large remote or online classes. Often, the solutions are bespoke, custom outcomes for a single classroom that are expensive to scale. Commercial computer games and esports may offer a solution. In this paper we aim to define critical thinking in education and how this relates to skills in esports, including decision making, problem solving, making a game plan, developing strategy and communication. To achieve this, we propose a conceptual framework to assess effectiveness of esports in teaching critical thinking using an adapted digital game-based learning framework and the learning goals of critical thinking. We support the framework with an esport case example of Rocket League with a lesson plan.