A mobile edutainment application TuTee: Turkish teacher by edutainment (original) (raw)

Educational entertainment (edutainment) can be described as any activity that includes both educational and entertainment entities. In the edutainment applications the ratio of the education and entertainment can vary. In the digital age, the shift from the classical educational methodologies to the technologically enriched, interactive applications is unavoidable. In this paper, edutainment is investigated by a mobile application named as TuTee on elementary school students. The students use TuTee first by choosing their grade level, courses with topics along with the game scenario to play with. They provide financial support from the tests they answered correctly. In one of the available scenarios they found a company to produce electricity by solar energy. They should consider the solar energy map of the country and locate the production materials cleverly. The application generates states such as tax payments, company costs, crisis, weather conditions, etc. to teach the students how to manage risks and benefits/opportunities in real life and behave strategically. TuTee is decorated with meta-cognitive strategies that provide an increase in students' cognitive performance and it is presented for developing the student's learning skills in a game environment. Additionally, it is increasing their entrepreneurship activities and strategic thinking abilities, and also improving their knowledge about country resources and cultural entities.