Using Edutainments in Teaching Orthodontic Lateral Cephalometric and Dental Cast Analysis

Background: Many educators have developed an interest in an emerging new concept called entertainment education (edutainment). Edutainment is a kind of tool that, in this age of technology, can be easily incorporated into education. Objectives: This study aimed to use edutainment for teaching orthodontic lateral cephalometric and dental cast analysis as well as to evaluate the dental students’ attitudes towards it. Methods: In this cross-sectional study, the multimedia-enhanced with edutainment was designed using Articulate Storyline version 3.5. To evaluate the students’ attitudes, 52 ninth-semester dental students doing their second semester in 2019 - 2020 were included in the study. Then they were asked to complete a standard questionnaire with a 7-point Likert scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree and including 26 items in eight domains of perceived self-efficacy, perceived satisfaction, understanding usefulness, behavioral concept, e-learning system quality, interactive learning activities, e-learning effectiveness, and multimedia instructions. Data were analyzed and expressed using independent sample t-test, one-way ANOVA, and descriptive statistics. Results: The majority of the students had positive attitudes towards the areas of perceived self-efficacy (83.3%), perceived satisfaction (90.4%), perceived usefulness (96.8%), behavioral intention (91.7%), e-learning system quality (75%), interactive learning activities (73.1%), e-learning effectiveness (88.5%), and multimedia education (85.3%). Conclusions: In sum, the students’ attitudes towards learning were positively and significantly influenced by the designed educational multimedia enhanced with edutainments to teach lateral cephalometric analysis in orthodontics. It was found that the application of edutainment as an educational tool together with traditional training may have been an effective method for teaching and, therefore, it was recommended that edutainment should be used as an alternative to traditional methods during crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic.