I will describe a course on “Edutainment” presented at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in Fall of 2006. The course was a blend of an introductory class in learning science with one in game design and was meant to teach students how to make educational games. There were several recurring themes in the course: How can playing games teach people? What makes a game fun? What is the right blend between education and entertainment? How does immersion help teaching? Why are some educational games so boring?

I will talk about our experiences and the conclusions we came to. We critiqued many games in this course and I will show examples of successes as well as failures.