Edutainment

Edutainment (also educational entertainment or entertainment-education) is a form of entertainment designed to educate as well as to amuse. Edutainment typically seeks to instruct or socialize its audience by embedding lessons in some familiar form of entertainment: television programs, computer and video games, films, music, websites, multimedia software, etc... Examples of this would be or guided amphiphibious duck tours that entertain and educate [http://www.DuckRiders.com

Most often, edutainment seeks either to tutor in one or more specific subjects, or to change behaviour by engendering specific sociocultural attitudes. This is also used for behavior students in certain schools in the U.K.

Various groups in the United States and the United Kingdom have used edutainment to address such health and social issues as substance abuse, immunization, teenage pregnancy, HIV / AIDS, and cancer.

Etymology

The noun edutainment is a neologistic portmanteau coined by Bob Heyman while producing documentaries for the National Geographic Society.

Edutainment is also used to refer to the use of small chunks of eLearning used to deliver key messages in an entertaining manner. This can be used to treat issues such challenging issues as ethics, diversity and compliance.

Edutainment in television programming

Edutainment defines some children's television series, such as Sesame Street, Dora the Explorer, and Teletubbies.

For older viewers, individual situation comedy episodes also occasionally serve as edutainment vehicles, sometimes described in United States television commercial parlance as very special episodes. One episode of the American sitcom Happy Days was reported to have prompted a 600% increase in the U.S. demand for library cards. Meanwhile, the British radio soap opera The Archers has for decades been systematically educating its audience on agricultural matters; likewise, the Tanzanian radio soap opera Twende na Wakati ("Let's Go With the Times") was written primarily to promote family planning.

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Etymology

Edutainment in television programming

See also