Technologies to feed your mind: implementing edutainment laboratories

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to present edutainment environments devoted to educational robotics, evolutionary robotics and chaos theory, with the aim to provide ideas that can be easily reproduced in different contexts. The adopted approaches, the research settings, the technical and technological organisation, the tools used and the activities here described, synthesise the results of different research work carried out by the Laboratory of Psychology and Cognitive Sciences of the University of Calabria. Edutainment labs are part of the constructivist framework that joins education and entertainment to create rich learning environment through hands-on activities and using technologies. The design of these edutainment environments is critical because it is necessary to combine contents, tools and skills to be acquired, considering motivational components such as, novelty, curiosity, play, competition, teamwork, joyful activities. We observed how students simply learn and experiment practically advanced scientific concepts of contemporary science.