How The Principles Of Fantasy Sports Are Helping Kids Learn

By Will Mossa,    News

Multiple studies have documented the growing trend of apathy among young Americans toward world events. A National Geographic survey, for instance, found that only 37 percent of young people (18-24) could locate Iraq on a map; 48 percent think that Islam is the predominant religion in India (it’s Hinduism); and 20 percent place Sudan in Asia (it’s the largest country in Africa).

Throwing up his hands in frustration one day, Eric Nelson, a civics and history teacher at North Lakes Academy in the Minneapolis suburbs turned to his online fantasy football league for a distraction. Instead, what he found was inspiration. Realizing how much he was learning about the NFL in the process of managing his fantasy team, he thought: What if I applied the mechanisms and tools used in fantasy sports to world events? “The next day I went in and [the class] drafted countries,” he recalls, “and I scored them based on how many times they were mentioned in the news.” And thus Fantasy Geopolitics, an online tool to engage students in world events, was born.


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