Talk:Educational entertainment

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): StephanieJL.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 20:13, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

Untitled

This article should mention what a crappy little bit of Newspeak this word is. Nasty, ugly little bugger, isn't it? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 138.163.0.43 (talk) 19:24, 1 February 2008 (UTC)

haw haw

While this phrase can be considered a neologism, I believe that it has become the most common term for this concept. I recommend that the content at Entertainment-Education be merged into this article. Rossami (talk) 06:54, 13 Mar 2005 (UTC)

• Yes. Edutain is just another form of the word Edutainment. They mean the same thing ard aren't different enough to warrant seperate articles.--Anoma lee 06:52, 7 March 2006 (UTC)
• Merge. I agree that these two articles should be merged. Kukini 14:07, 15 May 2006 (UTC)
• Yes, of course. HistoryBA 15:59, 25 May 2006 (UTC)

You should also metion the fact that there use of it in computers, particularly Linux Distrobutions and KDE 68.148.138.209 21:06, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

Etymology

We need a citation if we are going to credit a specific person with coining this word. -Kukini 16:19, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

Someone familiar with dime museums might be able to come up with an antebellum citation. --Damian Yerrick (talk | stalk) 03:32, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

First Example of Edutainment

The first example in the introduction just gives a note marker to the link in the notes section. There is no descirption of how this note pertains to Edutainment. Additionally, I fail to see the 'Edutainment' aspect of said note/site. It is a website with gallaries of pictures with next to no explanation of what is in the pictures. I would suggest removing the note from the article. - Everchanging02 20:21, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

terminology

I'll see if I can dig up some citations, but "edutainment" usually refers to a specific cultural era, mainly the educational software of the 1980s and 90s, at which time computers in education were new, and educational software was extremely widespread (nearly every school district had Apple ][ machines with lots of software). Modern-day producers of games that aim to also inform generally don't use the term, and call their work serious games instead; within the game studies literature that's also the main modern term, with "edutainment" used only when analyzing historical games of the 80s/90s era. --Delirium (talk) 08:00, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

Merge edutainment, educational game, and educational software

Hi there! I was looking over education game-related articles, and there's quite a bit of overlap. Here's what I've found:

• Edutainment - "Edutainment (also infotainment or entertainment-education) is a form of entertainment designed to educate as well as to amuse."
• Educational game - "Educational games are games that are designed to teach people about certain subjects, expand concepts, reinforce development, understand an historical event or culture, or assist them in learning a skill as they play. The types of games include board, card, and video games."
• Educational software#Children's learning and home learning - "The design of educational software programmes for home use has been influenced strongly by computer gaming concepts – in other words, they are designed to be fun as well as educational. However as far as possible a distinction should be drawn between proper learning titles (such as these) and software where the gaming outweighs the educational value (described later)."
• Educational software#Edutainment - "In a broader sense, the term edutainment describes an intentional merger of computer games and educational software into a single product (and could therefore also comprise more serious titles described above under children’s learning software)."
• Educational software#Computer games with learning value - "These are games which were originally developed for adults or older children and which have potential learning implications. For the most part, these games provide simulations of different kinds of human activities, allowing players to explore a variety of social, historical and economic processes."
• Educational toys - "While it is not uncommon to find computers in the modern elementary school classroom, it is not yet common to find children actively engaged in video games for educational development. However, as computers and video games take an ever larger role in our lives and the lives of children, so too will their role in educational toys and games."
• Video Games in Education - "It is important to emphasize how video games interact with the learning process of adolescents and children."

These concepts are all very loosely and poorly defined on Wikipedia. It seems that no one had a clear understanding of what these respective terms mean when they wrote the articles. I don't even know what they mean, and scholarship seems rather flexible on the terminology and categorization as well. I recommend that we combine closely-related concepts into one article and give each article a clear purpose. As much as possible, it would be helpful to distinguish between different levels of educational content. We could have three categories: purely educational resources (such as a dictionary application), educational resources that incorporate game elements (such as My Chinese Coach) and games that have an incidental or partial learning element (such as Sim City). I'd very much like to hear more ideas, though.

In any case, the current state of affairs simply can't go on. It's confusing and redundant, and makes it difficult to categorize related articles. Please share your thoughts and let me know what you'd like to do with these articles. Thanks! CaseyPenk (talk) 12:54, 31 May 2012 (UTC)

I agree that some of these articles or sections could be merged. A distinction should be kept, however, between software (including video games) and physical toys. There are a lot of sources spread across these various articles, and if you have time to read through some of them, it may be helpful in generating a more coherent organization of the content.Dialectric (talk) 11:19, 26 June 2014 (UTC)

Upcoming Changes

Hello, everyone! For about a month now, I have been researching and planning out how I can use what I have learned to improve this article, and thus am hoping to start transferring the larger edits I have practiced in my Sandbox onto the actual article. In summary, with the changes that I will make, I want to improve the article's comprehensiveness and organization. For example, I am planning on adding a "History" section with the subsections of "Concept" and "Terminology" so that readers will still be aware of the differing timelines of the entire concept and its actual terminology. Additionally, I think that the article would be better understood by viewers if all of the subsections under “By media” and “By setting outside of the classroom” were put under a section called “Application,” since all of them represent how the concept of edutainment is apparent in these forms; with this proposition, I have practiced the creation of a subsection entitled "Theme parks" and have worked on already existing ones. Also, I have written out a section about the effects of edutainment and its implementation. Since I want to make sure that the significance of the ties between academia and edutainment will still be acknowledged in the article (and because most of the studies I found regarding the effects of edutainment have been in association with the classroom setting), I came up with the idea of making a section entitled “Effects in the classroom.” That way, the research that has been done in association with specific and singular vehicles of edutainment can remain in their respective subsections. Lastly, to make the article more balanced in its representation of the reception of edutainment, I am adding a "Criticism" section.

Within the next day, I will be making these (and some less major) changes to the article; I truly hope that doing so will largely improve the article as a whole. If any of you have any questions about my edits, want clarification, or have any feedback for me, please let me know. And, of course, feel free to bolster what I add with more information. I would be more than happy to work with you all in order to help make this article reach its full potential.

--StephanieJL (talk) 21:18, 27 April 2017 (UTC)