June 24th, 2024
By Georgia, a student at Blue Heron Public School
Hello, my name is Georgia. I am a student at Blue Heron Public School. At our school, we have a Girls Who Game club, or GWG. We started the club with level one last spring, expanded with level two in the fall, and included level three for the first time in this session. The level three program involves learning about Esports and ends with a tournament. This is my experience with GWG Esports.
There were four GWG members in the level three program, but we needed six players to compete in the tournament. One of our level two members and one of the level one members moved up, so we had a full team.
To prepare, we started to do random build challenges in Minecraft. We made our own personal skins that were unique to us. Once our skins were ready, we made player trading cards with our GWG experience and other information. During our meetings, we had help from Brenda from Advanced Learning Partnerships. Brenda helped our team bond, learn coding skills, and helped us to find our strengths that we could apply to any of our upcoming build challenges.
The week before the tournament, they released the build challenges for the tournament. Once this happened, we immediately got to work. It was time to plan! From our talks with Brenda, we knew what things we wanted to build and which team member would suit the job best. When we had all of the plans worked out, we started to practice each build to see how it would go.
When the tournament day arrived, we used Microsoft Teams to meet as a team with our coaches and a judge. Five other teams were competing in the tournament. We would play each team in an individual round, and then all compete together in a final round. The tournament started at 1 p.m. and ended at 4 p.m. We built for three hours straight!
During the Space Race game, we needed to make a space station on the moon and have a living area, a power source, life support, and an A.I. feature. This A.I. feature was optional, but it would give you more points. We ended up building an epic space station. It was so cool.
Two of our players got kicked out of the world when we played in the Gold Rush game arena. This means we only had four players to do all the jobs within the 10-minute time limit. We didn’t panic, and those players just gave us ideas and feedback while we worked. We had to create a modern, sustainable mine. We included renewable energy, a reclamation site, a community gathering place, and more. When the tournament was over, we got feedback from our judge and we were awarded the collaboration award!
We enjoyed this experience so much that we are now holding our own Esports tournament at Blue Heron Public School for all students in Grades 5 and 6 who want to give it a try. The GWG team is helping to host worlds; trying out the shoutcasting role; and helping with the judging of the builds. Honestly, I think the best part is that the winning team of the school tournament will face off against our GWG level three Esports team!
On behalf of Blue Heron PS and the level three GWG team, I can say that we all loved Esports and the entire GWG program. We are the Blue Heron Builders Esports team of 2024. Game on!
#StudentVoice Series
This article is written by a WRDSB student and is part of the Student Agency and Voice program. Student journalists embody WRDSB’s commitment to creating space for students to tell their stories. They are ambassadors for their peers as they share their personal experiences and stories about their schools and communities in their unique voices.