As the first collection of studies to explore the use of edutainment within festival experiences, this book extends current knowledge and understanding of festival experiences. Relying on a series of international case studies, this book offers readers unique and important insights that emphasise the benefit of edutainment activities for enhanced audience learning, engagement, and festival satisfaction. Although there is an ample amount of studies concerning festival experiences, as well as the use of edutainment within tourism, few have explored the use of edutainment within festival experiences. This oversight has created a lack in knowledge and understanding, despite the clear benefits of enjoyable learning experiences - edutainment. Moreover, it has created a gap between academia and practice, as the contributing authors have demonstrated, festivals are utilising edutainment to enhance their audience experience, yet scholars have failed to acknowledge this. In response to this oversight, the editors have assembled a carefully curated collection of chapters that include a wide range of international case studies, from science and food festivals to heritage and dark festivals. Through a variety of methodologies and methods, including interviews, observations, databases, netnography, and social media analysis in both face-to-face and digital interactions involving the festival participants, organisers, and other relevant stakeholders, the contributing authors have provided a well-rounded global perspective on how edutainment is applied within festival experiences. This book is valuable for scholars, festival organisers, policy makers and students interested in or studying festivals, events, edutainment and/or experience design. Other tourism industry scholars, professionals and students of, for example, visitor attractions, museums, theatre and hospitality services, may also find this book of value considering their established use of edutainment within their sectors.

This volume contains contributions from Edutainment 2008, the 3rd International Conference on E-Learning and Games. It serves as a forum for stimulating and disseminating innovative research ideas, theories, emerging technologies in the field.

With great pleasure we would like to present the third volume of the journal Trans- tions on Edutainment. This journal, part of the Springer series Lecture Notes in C- puter Science, is devoted to research and development in the field of edutainment. Edutainment, also known as educational entertainment or entertainment-education, denotes all forms of entertainment designed to educate as well as to provide fun. This approach is motivated by the growing demands on individuals for life-long learning and the need to integrate effective learning opportunities throughout life. As such, edutainment has attracted increasing interest in the last few years. The first 12 articles of this issue represent a selection of outstanding contributions from Edutainment 2009, the 4th International Conference on E-Learning and Games held in Canada, in August 2009. The main purpose of the Edutainment conferences is the discussion, presentation, and information exchange of scientific and technological developments in the new community. These 12 papers cover mainly the topic of using games to stimulate learners’ learning motivation, i. e.

Computer games have attracted much attention over the years, mostly attention of the less flattering kind. This has been true for computer games focused on entertainment, but also for what for years seemed a sure winner, edutainment. These years the area has gained new momentum and labels - game-based learning, serious games and educational games are just some of them. This dissertation aims to be a contribution to understanding educational use of computer games by building a framework that goes beyond edutainment. The framework laid out extends from an experiential learning approach, where concrete experiences are the starting point that can be transformed through reflection, instruction and active experimentation. It is concluded that computer games provide rich concrete experience that can be manipulated in the game universe providing more handles for the student compared to other media formats.

With the continued application of gaming for training and education, which has seen exponential growth over the past two decades, this book offers an insightful introduction to the current developments and applications of game technologies within educational settings, with cutting-edge academic research and industry insights, providing a greater understanding into current and future developments and advances within this field. Following on from the success of the first volume in 2011, researchers from around the world presents up-to-date research on a broad range of new and emerging topics such as serious games and emotion, games for music education and games for medical training, to gamification, bespoke serious games, and adaptation of commercial off-the shelf games for education and narrative design, giving readers a thorough understanding of the advances and current issues facing developers and designers regarding games for training and education. This second volume of Serious Games and Edutainment Applications offers further insights for researchers, designers and educators who are interested in using serious games for training and educational purposes, and gives game developers with detailed information on current topics and developments within this growing area.

We believe that this book will have an extended lifespan, not on your bookshelf but in your workbag. It is an extremely useful tool, which can support social interventions, as well as school and community projects. We have used language that everyone should understand with the hope that the book will be useful to community activists with strong interest in using the empowerment and behaviour change strategies of Edutainment Therapy to explore various cultural approaches - theatre, music, dance and drama (the performing arts); behaviour change and communications strategies and to make an impact on individuals in various groups and communities. Anyone interested in social work or counselling may take up this book and, with serious application of the principles, ideas, techniques and practices, make a difference.

This journal subline serves as a forum for stimulating and disseminating innovative research ideas, theories, emerging technologies, empirical investigations, state-of-the-art methods, and tools in all different genres of edutainment, such as game-based learning and serious games, interactive storytelling, virtual learning environments, VR-based education, and related fields. It covers aspects from educational and game theories, human-computer interaction, computer graphics, artificial intelligence, and systems design. This issue contains a special section on serious games with 8 outstanding contributions from the VS-Games 2011 conference; furthermore, there are 13 regular papers. These contributions clearly demonstrate the use of serious games and virtual worlds for edutainment applications and form a basis for further exploration and new ideas.