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1. Prologue

Wikipedia (2020, par. 1), defines edutainment or educational entertainment as “media designed to educate through entertainment,” and states that the interest to do this has been present for hundreds of years. One example is the Poor Richard’s Almanack which demonstrated early implementation of edutainment; here, Benjamin Franklin combined entertaining and educational content into and instructional booklet of rules of conduct for colonists using puzzles. In this way, Figure 1 shows edutainment as part of a continuum: “the continuum and overlaps between the world of development and entertainment; multiple sectors lie in between, such as SBCC (Social and Behavior Change Communications), C4D (Communication for Development), Entertainment-Education and Social Impact Entertainment” (Deml, 2018, par. 1), with applications range from TV (e.g. Sesame Street) to games, theme parks (e.g. Epcot Centre) and museums.

Figure 1.

Impact-Entertainment continuum

Source: (Deml, 2018).

Today, technology has pervaded all fields of human knowledge and activity, and edutainment is not an exception. Fields such as virtual and augmented reality, gamification, serious games, graphics, imaging, game rendering, animation, computer vision and e-learning are now considered important in education. Therefore, edutainment was born keeping in mind the need of collaborative research and practice required by innovative educational entertaining applications; it is important to learn to what extent technology and entertainment are useful for learning. That is why Edutainment 2019, the 13^th International Conference on E-Learning and Games, was a place where researchers from all over the world and particularly from Latin America, exchanged experiences in the emerging field which combines education and entertainment. As previous versions which took place in China, Canada, Germany, Australia, UK, Edutainment 2019 covered all aspects of pedagogical principles, designs, and technological issues for education, research, and entertainment.

Professor Zhigeng Pan

Founder, Chair of Steering Committee of Edutainment Conferences

References

Wikipedia (16 June 2020). Educational entertainment. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_entertainment

Deml, T. (19 April 2018). File:Development-Entertainment Continuum.png. Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Development-Entertainment_Continuum.png