There is a popular saying that I think every child has heard: First learn, then play. It is mainly uttered in the context of doing homework after school. It has a certain motivational power because it puts fun as a reward for hard work. However, it can make learning activities no longer viewed positively, and joining in with reluctance.
Edutainment, a combination of play and learning, is changing that completely. By mixing both at the same time, it makes learning more fun and playing a little smarter. But why combine one with the other?
This is how we start learning
First, play is the natural and first form of acquiring knowledge about the world among children. In a pleasant environment, they have the opportunity to safely test their own skills and learn from them for the future. In addition, it is usually unconscious learning. The child has no idea that he is just learning something, and still does it willingly.
Here we can talk about learning-oriented fun, for example, to experimentally test how the cars move, and to measure the time, driving distance to find out the speed of the car, but not only that. Ordinary and casual play also promotes the development of knowledge or skills. Moving dolls promotes testing different ways of human interaction, while building something in a sandbox gives knowledge of construction techniques or the properties of the sand material.
Fun promotes memory
Human memory is still an area not fully explored by scientists. Nevertheless, thanks to scientific research, we are able to cite several ways that make us remember things for a long time and quite fully.
The emotions we experience at a given moment affect how we remember a memory and help us recall something after time. They are like bookmarks in the directories of our memory. This makes it much easier to find those more interesting moments. In turn, by creating an educational experience, we make it stand out from the daily sitting in desks and write more strongly on the memory cards.
Each of us remembers those moments when we succeeded or achieved something. The same may be true after solving a problem within a project. First of all, there is emotion again. Secondly, we often recreate such moments in our lives again, telling someone about it or, for example, telling ourselves about it, in order to prove ourselves. Revisiting memories or various pieces of information once in a while also strengthens the memory.
Pleasure motivates
People are almost addicted to taking pleasure. This is how we are built. Our brain has a dopaminergic pathway (a system of regions in the brain associated with the production of dopamine) that is activated when we do something pleasurable. Among other things, it is responsible for that pleasant feeling we get in positive situations. It is our brain’s way of rewarding and self-motivating ourselves to continue doing things that are useful to us. Among the activities associated with experiencing pleasure, we will find, for example, entertainment, eating, gaining achievements or shopping loot, among others, in situations that evolutionarily helped us survive (getting food, strengthening social relationships, taking care of our own safety).
When we perform a certain action and are rewarded for it with a pleasant feeling caused by the release of dopamine, we want the event to be replicated in our lives because we felt good at the time. That’s how motivation is born to seek out such stimuli that make us happy, and to engage in what we feel good after. It is the drive to perform a certain activity in order to obtain an external or internal reward, such as the release of dopamine or a feeling of well-being. The whole process also has an evolutionary basis, to keep us closer to those things that are good for us, and far away from the bad ones.
Why not use this mechanism in education? Using play and edutainment, we are able to slowly introduce something like this. Entertainment elements woven into the teaching materials will make the student feel pleasant in the given classes, but also motivated to wait for the next class.
Enriches with new practical skills
It would take a long time to list all the skills that can be gained through play and edutainment. Much depends on the very form of such smart entertainment. I will list a few examples:
- Planning, strategy building,
- problem solving,
- discussing,
- To express their own opinions and teach,
- Developing interpersonal relations,
- conflict resolution,
- physical development,
- Developing imagination and creativity,
- exploring the world,
- Understanding where certain rules and relationships come from,
- Various kinds of technical and manual skills.
It’s a nice and effective time spent
The combination of fun and learning is a bombastic mix in lessons that can translate into efficiency in our learning. Equally important, it will also be an enjoyable time that will evoke positive feelings. Such a win win situation.
Sources:
https://www.psychologistworld.com/emotion/emotion-memory-psychology
https://researchrepository.murdoch.edu.au/id/eprint/993/1/Published_Version.pdf
