TSU to open cyberclassroom in February to study games impact on people

TOMSK, Jan 4 – RIA Tomsk. Tomsk State University to open the first cyberclassroom within the framework of the National Association of University ESports (NAUKA consortium); it will host eSports tournaments and scientific research on the impact of computer games on human cognitive abilities, Director of the TSU Center for Applied Big Data Analysis Vyacheslav Goiko told.

Earlier it was reported that eSports is part of a new direction of socio-humanitarian engineering at TSU within the framework of the Priority 2030 program. The university is studying eSports in three aspects - as a sport, as a tool to influence cognitive abilities, and as an element of impact on a person's psycho-emotional state.

"The cyberclassroom is a teaching lab where we will be running eSports tournaments, observing students and collecting data: how they play, how they behave and interact with other players. The class will be opened on the Day of Russian Science (celebrated on February 8, - Ed.)," Goiko said.

The cyberclassroom will be equipped with 29 state-of-the-art computers, he said. It will be the first one in the network of cyberclassrooms of the NAUKA consortium, which was established in 2021 on the initiative of TSU and united more than 62 Russian universities. In the future, other classes will be created where university scientists will be able to study the impact of games on students' cognitive abilities, which in the future will make it possible to develop programs for the gamification of modern education.

"Tournaments will also be held here, but we don't have the goal of training a gigantic number of eSports athletes - we want to better prepare regular students. And games are a tool that, with the right approach, allows you to develop the brain," the agency's interlocutor said.

Earlier it was reported that the development of eSports is one of the priority research areas of TSU in the study of the impact of computer games on social and personal skills. In cooperation with other universities, TSU plans to create computer games to develop cognitive abilities.