Edutainment

When I look back at lectures in the distant past that I still remember, two student presentations immediately come to my mind, in spite of the fact that decades have past since then. One was about the living conditions of truck drivers. The students had prepared a real size truck cabin from cardboard and explained how many years of their life truck drivers spend in this confined space. The other one was on the Italian writer Gramsci, and the presenting student entered the stage with a big pizza box. So the audience would at least remember that Gramsci was Italian, if nothing else.

The common element of both lectures was that the spoken word was accompanied with the physical display of something related to the content. This obviously helped to memorize the event for years to come.

This is an important aspect of ‘edutainment’ that combines educational content with forms of presentation that make it easy to grasp and pleasant to follow. Much of our teaching unfortunately does not fall into this category. But if we want to make lifelong learning more popular, it needs a bigger portion of edutainment, which does not remind us too much of “school”. Or better, to change “school” in a way that it will trigger pleasant memories for decades.