Fall 2021 & Winter 2022 EQ

Photo courtesy of Samantha Jones, Associate Editor of the Lovely County Citizen

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ftentimes the lion’s share of the attention EAST receives is related to technologies like 3D printing, computer science, or software development. But EAST casts a wider net than that—and with new equipment being shipped to over a hundred schools thanks to the Directors Grant—EAST programs are expanding their focus on streaming original content.

Audio and video production provide great opportunities to fulfill needs in schools, and EAST students at Eureka Springs High School realized that this year. The school’s esports team had a need that could be addressed this way and provided a great opportunity to put this project into action “I thought it would be good to find a way to give representation to clubs and organizations who don’t have it like traditional sports do,” said Sydney Shaw, an 11th grade EAST student at Eureka Springs High School. “So we came up with the Twitch channel idea and then it kind of took off from there. Esports is the thing we’ve started with but we are slowly going to tack on other clubs as well that could represent all we have to offer.”

In order to do this, Shaw and her fellow students are using many of the tools that EAST provides such as microphones and the new Blackmagic ATEM Mini Live Pro video switcher.

“We have the switcher that we use to switch through cameras and we also use it for turning microphones on and off,” Shaw said. “We use OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) for the bulk of it right now.

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It’s a software that can transition from different scenes, so that is our main controller and the switcher controls everything outside of the games.”

Junior Meredith Loudermilk says that the biggest challenge the students have faced is how adaptive they have to be with streaming different games on different devices, as they are forced to use different setups.

“We are still trying to work out balancing because we have different games we have to do,” Loudermilk said. “They’re from different devices so like we have League of Legends which is from PC, and then we have Super Smash Bros. which is through the Nintendo Switch which is a different setup that we have to have.”

The esports team is grateful for the students continuing through their struggles, as EAST facilitator and assistant esports coach Adam Louderback says they use the streams as a valuable resource to improve their play.

“They’re getting a lot of views after the games through the VODs (Video On Demand),” Louderback said. “We have the teams reviewing tape to find out what they did good and bad, and how they can improve for next week. The games don’t save the footage for the players, so they only have the footage from EAST’s live streams to go off of.”

250 miles away, Magnet Cove High School’s football team experienced an incredible season, and two EAST students, who are