Claudia Zúñiga - Serious applications of technology in games and health

CEO Cyri Jones

CEO-Zen Maker Lab, Canada. In his own words: As far as I can remember, I have been drawn to entrepreneurship. While I was doing an undergraduate science degree at the University of Guelph, I got my first taste of a starting a new serious business, a leading environmental news scanning business run out of my dorm room and then later doing an MBA from UBC with a focus on technology entrepreneurship. A course at UBC with the legendary Haig Farris where business students were matched up with engineers was inspirational and sent me down the pathway of appreciating the benefits of cross-disciplinary teams and what it takes to start and grow a venture. From that one course came billions of dollars in local start-up valuations. Haig would show us the ropes and bring in guest speakers from industry each week with insights beyond any textbook. I was hooked (C. Jones, personal communication, 18 July 2019).

Eng. Fernando Alonso Gómez Carrillo

Systems Engineer from the Universidad Piloto de Colombia, Master in Direction and Management of Educational Institutions from the Universidad de la Sabana and Java Programmer certified by Sun Microsystems, with more than 19 years of experience. Moreover, for 11 years he has been Technology Director in the Tourism Sector (Carlson Wagonlit Travel), where he developed specialized software for the management and operation of this type of companies (ERP). Furthermore, he’s lecturer and author of articles on topics related to e-learning and virtual worlds applied to educational environments.

Artist Luis Astorquiza

Systems and Computing Engineer (Pontificia. Universidad Javeriana Cali), PhD Candidate in Design and Creation (Universidad de Caldas), and Director of the DaVinci Program for Transdisciplinary Research and Development in Digital Creation (Pontificia Universidad Javeriana Cali), he has exhibited his works in Colombia, México, Argentina, Brazil, Spain, South Korea. Invited by ACC (Asia Culture Center of South Korea), Medialab Prado (Spain), Technological Institute of Monterey (México), University of Sao Paulo and University of Vitoria (Brazil), Tres de Febrero University (Argentina), among others; he’s the guest digital artist for Edutainment 2019 and leads the global initiative ACADEMIALAB promulgated in Medialab Prado, that seeks to bring the academic world closer to the digital experimentation spaces in Labs.

1. Prologue

Wikipedia (2020, par. 1), defines edutainment or educational entertainment as “media designed to educate through entertainment,” and states that the interest to do this has been present for hundreds of years. One example is the Poor Richard’s Almanack which demonstrated early implementation of edutainment; here, Benjamin Franklin combined entertaining and educational content into and instructional booklet of rules of conduct for colonists using puzzles. In this way, Figure 1 shows edutainment as part of a continuum: “the continuum and overlaps between the world of development and entertainment; multiple sectors lie in between, such as SBCC (Social and Behavior Change Communications), C4D (Communication for Development), Entertainment-Education and Social Impact Entertainment” (Deml, 2018, par. 1), with applications range from TV (e.g. Sesame Street) to games, theme parks (e.g. Epcot Centre) and museums.

Figure 1.

Impact-Entertainment continuum

Source: (Deml, 2018).

Today, technology has pervaded all fields of human knowledge and activity, and edutainment is not an exception. Fields such as virtual and augmented reality, gamification, serious games, graphics, imaging, game rendering, animation, computer vision and e-learning are now considered important in education. Therefore, edutainment was born keeping in mind the need of collaborative research and practice required by innovative educational entertaining applications; it is important to learn to what extent technology and entertainment are useful for learning. That is why Edutainment 2019, the 13 thInternational Conference on E-Learning and Games, was a place where researchers from all over the world and particularly from Latin America, exchanged experiences in the emerging field which combines education and entertainment. As previous versions which took place in China, Canada, Germany, Australia, UK, Edutainment 2019 covered all aspects of pedagogical principles, designs, and technological issues for education, research, and entertainment.

Professor Zhigeng Pan

Founder, Chair of Steering Committee of Edutainment Conferences

References

Wikipedia (16 June 2020). Educational entertainment. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_entertainment

Deml, T. (19 April 2018). File:Development-Entertainment Continuum.png. Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Development-Entertainment_Continuum.png

2. Invited Keynote paper

While planning Edutainment 2019 and CoTH, the organizing committee were aware of the importance of making Cali the world centre of serious games and health technologies for a few days. The event reunited around 100 participants from 10 countries with several profiles: we had undergraduate and graduate students, a group of students from a public high school (for whom we designed two training sessions), and excellent authors, artists, entrepreneurs, and professors from Latin America, North America, Asia and Europe; also, we had the local press and one International Game Developers Association (IGDA) representative. Although there were a lot of chances for networking, we wanted to show the world what we were able to do in Colombia. For that reason, we not only invited five keynotes from overseas to bring knowledge from the world to Colombia, but also four keynotes from Colombia so people from all over the world could take Colombian knowledge back home. In this section, one Colombian author discusses his experiences with Minecraft as an educational tool.

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