Edutainment is the mixture out of education and entertainment. Teaching is always in battle with media dealing with first love, personal and social problems, multimedia overflow and so on. How do we get students to pay attention? Edutainment is one way out of many others used to reach students.
Edutainment is Ambivalent
Edutainment came up with TV shows where scientific research was explained in a popular way to help people understand scientific progress and to support the acceptance of tremendous tax expenses for scientific projects. Other reasons were the explanation of space research programs with peaceful, and therefore generally accepted concepts of new space programs. In addition, edutainment was another way to communicate expenses in health systems, environmental changes, energy politics and innovations in education reform.
Edutainment changed quickly from a pure science show into populistic distribution of more or less researched facts with more and more multimedia content that made it more a show of special effects than a visualization of scientific progress. With the growing acceptance of such shows in the 80s, people got a big picture of what science in the public may be. Unfortunately this multimedia experience did not meet the reality at schools or university where students were faced with hard work, dusty mathematics, time consuming, often frustrating exercises and really small steps that bring science to that level we later meet as great effects in a 3D animation. For students with disabilities, edutainment and the multimedia experience was a confusing educational jumble of special effects that didn't meet their educational needs or address their academic deficiencies.
Education, Entertainment and Media
The permanent presence of media breaks down the students learning speed, learning progress and their readiness to study itself. Learning mathematics is not very popular because students learn from the beginning that a simple guy from the neighbourhood earns millions of dollars by citing stupid nonsense and the mathematician lives in poor situations never earning what his work is really worth. In addition most idols of young people are stars without any education, knowledge or competence, they mostly draw profit from having been discovered in the right place at the right time.
Each lecture is now in direct competition with this "real world" experienced by the students. Many educators now draw the conclusion that schools need to spend more attention and expenses to media attainment, cool communication styles, toys, contests, awards for everything and whatever to motivate students and to get them back to learn and study. All these tricks did not work for a long time and none improved the situation, especially for students with disabilities. The main reason for that is the hedonic adaption that lets us feel each improvement as a cool satisfaction - but only for a moment. After that moment of luck it becomes normality. What goes wrong in this battle for students special learning needs?
Reduction Instead of Expansion
Two ways are tried to solve this problem for students with disabilities. One is the multimedia based teaching that tries to be cooler, varicolored and impressive than media events outside the school. The other way is the opposite one. There teachers try to reduce media as far as possible. The second one seems to be more successful. The media overflow is choking the students brains and produces an additional information load to the kids that breaks down learning rates to a minimum as we still know from the cognitive load theory.
The reduction gives the students a chance to calm down, to concentrate and pay attention to the things really important for their education. The teacher has to close a learning gap for students with special needs. The satisfactory effect of self identification with heroes and stars in the glamour TV shows has to be replaced by follow ups of student's personal success. Real feelings like frustration and delight on ones own success must help the students to go from external hedonist behaviour to internal, really satisfactory experiences that strengthen the students personality instead of weakening them by increasing the gap between external observation and own disappointing situations that can only be improved by collecting material identification symbols. Edutainment must serve a different capacity in reaching students with disabilities and helping them grow academically and behaviorally in the classroom.