Information Technology and Edutainment: Education and Entertainment in the Age of Interactivity

The tight connection which occurs between entertainment and education has originated what is defined edutainment which can be considered as a continuous and innovative brain-training, which stimulates, in an interactive way, the capacity to combine attention and motivation to explore and learn. The role of games in learning is a common topic in research. The various games linked to the edutainment mechanism, in particular, have been analyzed to understand in what way and to which extent they can facilitate study, development of memory, attention, motivation and other cognitive processes as well as spatial abilities. The aim is the definition of “edutainment” as a branch of e-learning which promotes learning process in school, extra-school and didactic field in general, in a playful way, through multimedia applications. The idea of encouraging the integration of game, technology and learning is new and at the same time complex for its educational aims. At international level, United States Department of Education, with the cooperation of educational agents and teachers, recently developed a statistical table of the results reached by an important project for the creation of modules for the learning through Internet. Shown below there are information about the results of this project that were used to be transferred on a national level to start and implement the same project. The interactive technologies, really because they turn the users into actors, they can involve and entertain reducing the gap between the teacher/communicator, standing out as leader of knowledge, and the pupil receiving the information.