A perusal of the agenda for the upcoming FSTA summer conference turns up a very familiar face in the middle of Day 1 who will be delivering a different message.

Dr. Kim Beason has long been a regular presenter at the semi-annual Fantasy Sports Trade Association gatherings, talking through his latest results in fantasy consumer research. Before he gets to that this time, however, Beason will be joining Peter Schoenke of RotoWire to discuss “changing trends in fantasy football.”

“Have you ever wondered how popular IDPs and team QBs are?” the agenda teases. Yes, actually, I have quite a bit. I will be very interested in hearing what Beason has to say here.

Other points of interest include:

– a session with Andrew Brandt, current president of the National Football Post who formerly handled player contracts and salary-cap management for the Packers, to discuss the realities of the NFL’s current labor unrest and how a potential lockout might impact fantasy companies

– a “one-on-one” with Mickey Charles, president and CEO of The Sports Network

– a screening of Fantasyland over lunch on Day 1

– a two-room split on the conference’s second day, dividing into panels geared toward technical aspects and those focused on business; the latter ends with a session on shedding the “gambling” perception, an issue we’ve been particularly focused on around FSB.com recently.

The conference will take place June 9 and 10, with the fantasy football draft kicking things off the night before.

The FSTA also announced Tuesday a blog that will carry posts by Sara Holladay, the Fantasy Football Librarian, throughout the conference. Of course, you can also count on FSB.com for all the news from the Chicago event.

(Correction: A previous version of this story referred to Brandt as a former president of the Packers. He never held that title.)

Dan Flockhart has been using fantasy football to teach math since 1989 — back when most of us weren’t even yet playing the game — and turned his methods into an official line of textbooks that have been on the market since 2005. So, he already would have told you what an effective teaching tool fantasy sports can be.

Still, it never hurts to get a little official research behind you.

That’s why Flockhart collaborated with leading fantasy industry researcher Dr. Kim Beason to discover that our games really can raise students’ test scores.

“This is huge,” Beason reportedly said of the findings. “Across the board, both boys’ and girls’ test scores are up dramatically.”

Frankly, this study just helps to give real backing to a theory that makes immediate sense. Even the Berenstain Bears books I read to my daughter (and she then recites to herself) present the concept of teaching math to students via play, through active exercises that can be fun rather than words pulled straight from a 50-year-old text.

As Flockhart says, fantasy sports can take otherwise abstract concepts and from a subject such as algebra that challenges many a student and show their applications to real-life situations.

“If ‘T’ equals the number of touchdowns, then students know what they are dealing with,” Flockhart said. “Fantasy sports links math in the classroom to math in the real world.”

Hey, it worked for Tom Hanks’ character in Big.

Flockhart presents other findings from the teacher-survey portion of the study on his site, FantasySportsMath.com, such as these nuggets:

– 75 percent of teachers say students better understand math concepts when taught via the fantasy sports curriculum.

– 81 percent said students are more enthusiastic about math class.

We’ll look more at the results of this study as they become available.

At the Fantasy Sports Trade Association conference earlier this month, we learned from Dr. Kim Beason’s research that the number of avowed fantasy players had leveled off after several years of increases.

The obvious initial reaction to this information is to assume at least a temporary lull in industry growth. A different view of things, however, might just point to how business is thriving or perhaps just how much room to grow still remains.

We all know about the various businesses and affiliated websites that exist to support our fantasy games, and new versions enter the market all the time. Each entry represents at least one person’s belief that he or she can prosper in delivering fantasy sports to consumers in some way.

Lately, however, there seems to be more branching out into different areas and ancillary services that play off of the growing mainstream appeal or simply support the games that millions already play.

For starters, it’s been no surprise to see fantasy efforts extend beyond the more traditional sports to exploits such as bass fishing and wakeboarding and non-sports such as American Idol.

Beyond those kinds of competitions are the more complementary products. Multiple outlets exist, for example, that will provide opinions from lawyers to resolve league disputes for a fee. SportsJudge.com and FantasyDispute.com have each been around for at least several years already.

Two new entrants into the fantasy marketplace complement existing leagues in a similar fashion. FantasySportsInsurance.com seeks to sell policies to fantasy owners scared that a freak injury will prematurely separate them from their league entry fees. The creators of Mission Competition believe that there’s a significant market out there of leagues that lose an owner or two during the season and will pay to have the dead teams taken over.

We’ll see whether pursuits such as these turn into profitable businesses. The fact that companies are even looking to fill these perceived voids, however, indicates an industry with plenty of growth potential — a marketplace that’s still defining itself.

After years of rapid growth in its consumer base, the fantasy sports industry saw things plateau a bit in the past year, according to two sets of research presented by Ipsos’ Aaron Amic and Dr. Kim Beason at the FSTA conference this week.

Over the previous five years, fantasy consumers were increasing at an average rate of about 23 percent. In the past year, though, Ipsos found that about the same number of people reported playing fantasy sports in the United States and Canada as had in the year prior.

It stands to reason that the big growth stats from the early 2000s wouldn’t continue forever, but why did the upward trend go flat at this point?

Is it money? No. Even in the toughest economic times that many of us have every seen, most of the respondents to the Ipsos suvery who had never played fantasy or quit said their decision was based on a mere lack of interest. On top of that, it’s always been true that many more fantasy players go for free leagues than pay games.

Is the audience maturing without bringing in new young people? It doesn’t seem that way. According to Ipsos, the 12-17 and 18-34 age ranges presented the largest saturation of fantasy players (i.e., a larger percentage within each of those groups played fantasy in the past year than the numbers for other ranges sampled).

Is it a matter of us all hitting a period that just required folks to turn their attention elsewhere? Maybe. The time commitment was another reason cited by those who gave up or avoided fantasy. Even if tightening budgets didn’t keep them away, perhaps sheer concern for their jobs and bank accounts led more people to decide they couldn’t afford to join a league.

Was it just a strange year? Perhaps. One year hardly constitutes a trend, and things could look significantly different in 2010.

Over the coming days and weeks, FSB.com will check in with folks around the industry to see what they think of the growth plateau and whether fantasy companies need to change anything to counter it. We’ll also get more into the material presented in this year’s editions of the annual Fantasy Sports Trade Association studies.