Edutainment and Gamification

Edutainment is a blend of education and entertainment designed to make learning more enjoyable and engaging. It involves the use of media, games, storytelling, and other interactive methods to teach educational content in an entertaining way. By combining the fun elements of entertainment with educational objectives, edutainment aims to create a more effective and enjoyable learning experience, particularly for children and young audiences. 

Gamification is adding game elements and mechanics into non-game environments. It leverages the fun and addictive qualities of games, such as points, badges, leaderboards, and challenges, to enhance user experience and drive participation in various activities. Gamification is widely used in education, marketing, health, and workplace productivity to boost engagement, improve learning outcomes, foster competition and collaboration, and encourage positive behaviors. 

Making boring things a bit more exciting and engaging helps users increase their motivation and satisfaction. 

My personal experience with gamification lies in projects with a simple formula that keeps users interested - points and leaderboards. That is one of the most common ways of gamification. 

These projects have been made for museums or as demo apps for companies where the experience should be kept short. So the formula "who completes X faster wins" or "who gets more points wins" works wonders. 

As for edutainment, I've made a few games that helps players explore and learn new things. One of which is a train dispatch game where, instead of reading what a train dispatcher does, the player is put in the role of one and they must make decisions on where to divert trains. This game gives a more immersive and hands-on insight about the profession. 

Below are the projects I've worked on.