Brain food

Remember school trips?

Instead of spending the day in the classroom, staring out of the window, or trying hard to concentrate and not fidget, your class was taken somewhere where you could look, touch, hear about and experience something you didn't already know. You didn't daydream or fidget because you were being entertained at the same time. In fact, you were hardly aware that you were learning. It could even be fun.

Well that's edutainment!

Originally coined by the computer industry, the word was used to describe CD-ROM programs designed for education that also had an entertainment component to increase their appeal.

The term may be relatively new, but the concept isn't. Like all the places you may have visited on school trips - zoos, aquariums, botanical gardens, science or children's museums and the like, location-based entertainment facilities have long used information and education as the draw, while adding appeal through entertainment or amusement.

Work has switched from being predominately labour-based to being knowledge-based, and people are becoming increasingly educated, as more and more people go through university, or return to education to learn new skills.

Once, leisure was the reward for hard work and provided relaxation with absolutely no practical purpose other than mental and physical recuperation, but no loinger.

Understanding this, we develop interesting, new ways for people to learn and have fun at the same time.

At its most basic, edutainment is play. Children understand edutainment, and always have, even if adults forget how it was to be children. Their perception of the difference between work and play changes as they move from pre-school to elementary school.

Broadly speaking they call what they are told to do "work" and what they choose to do "play." But by the time they are at senior school, children may also call a teacher-directed activity "play"as long as it's fun.

Open-ended play is nature's process for learning and developing cognitively, emotionally, physically and socially.

We're all predisposed to explore and manipulate our world, and make our own discoveries. Games that are a combination of education and entertainment are "brain food" - not only are they nutritious and stimulating, but being fun, they also taste great, and can offer people deeply memorable and rich learning and discovery experiences.

The school trip list...