Multimedia Learning in Advanced Computer-based Contexts: `Discovering Trier'

Edutainment is a neologism that expresses the marriage of education and entertainment. In particular edutainment is a form of entertainment designed to educate as well as to amuse and typically seeks to instruct or socialize its audience by embedding lessons in some familiar form of entertainment: television programs, computer and video games, films, music, websites or multimedia software. On the other hand, the design and the implementation of not boring or repetitive edutainment are not trivial or easy tasks. In this paper we propose a new approach for the design of an edutainment. The proposed environment "translates" the storyboards of the games in a Dynamic Bayesian Networks that are the extension of Bayesian Networks for modelling times-series data. The Bayesian approach allows a dynamic adaptation of the game to the user's profile and the establishment of several paths in the same game. We furnish some results obtained by the use of a first prototype of our tool in real academic courses.