EduTainment Titles

[Sivakatirswami]

Judy: I second your motion that it is possible to make something 
fascinating enough to encourage young people to "go swimming" in the 
knowledge pool, and then want dive in again tomorrow.

Richmond: "It is perfectly possible to present educational materials in 
an interesting and absorbing fashion without cheapening it all with 
"tainment" 

By what logic is "entertainment" necessarily "cheap" ? In fact the best 
entertainment is very expensive! N'est ce pas?

Here at the monastery we watch TV and have "EDU" nights.

I find most TED talks extremely entertaining. (Not everyone does, but I 
do) ( Every Revolution programmer should run (not walk) to view the TED 
talk "Hole in the Wall"  .  BBC Documentaries by brave anthropologists 
trekking into rain forests talking with indigenous peoples, are both, 
educational and entertaining, but cost 100's of thousand of pounds to 
produce-- not "cheap."

 http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_themselves.html) 


We have RunRev 10 Thumbs typing program here and young Potriyan from 
Malaysia spent his summer vacation in Hawaii and he loved that program. 
It's very well designed. he found it "entertaining" and got up to 
50words a minute error free typing, so... "tainment" does not 
necessarily mean it has to be "silly song and dance show"... 
intellectually challenging can be very "entertaining" -- beautiful 
graphics (theoretically our forte) are "entertaining"

The original Snakes and Ladders games was designed in India. We have a 
copy of the original game, it is *incredibly* sophisticated and 
pedagogical at the same time... A sanskrit scholar was visiting from 
India recently, we had him translate for us all 280 squares... It could 
take you days and days playing this thing, all you do is roll dice but 
you learn a lot. But very entertaining (and even humorous... if you roll 
the dice and you are on a particular square you may slide off the board 
and end up on "Jaina" territory... very in joke... but educational, 
Jainism is not Hinduism... i.e. off the board. Entertaining. In this 
case, something that fits Lynns model: "technological bells and 
whistles" are minimal (roll dice: up a ladder or down a snake) but the 
content is super rich.

This would suggest that a given eduTainment software title, is only as 
"cheap" as it's content and design.

Richard: Thank you for the wonderful analysis: You are quite right, our 
little "ebooks" are really just  that: print matter repurposed onto 
cards... I have a few much cooler things in the hopper.

"In delivering educational materials, it adds value to deliver it in an 
application to the degree that the material is dependent on 
interaction."  well said...

Back on my original point here: Send me examples!

so far I have "off list" some excellent things: Sona Vocabulary; Learn 
Japanese Sllabaries, Randal's excellent little "tutor's"  Baseball Math, 
Word Racer, State Capitals SE.

Randals pieces  are marvelous examples of reducing a learning task to 
very small modular units, that are digestible by very young and fit the 
kind of delivery context I thinking of. They are focused on the learning 
with just a "tad" of gaming edge, enough to pull the students along...  
State Capitals SE I found quite entertaining.  good job...

Richmond and Judy! Send me some of your titles  (smile) (or point me to 
where I can buy them)

Sivakatirswami