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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   2630 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 6, 2022

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I was thinking about edutainment from when I was a kid. We had Treasure Mountain to help learn words, JumpStart for a whole bunch of interesting stuff each year, and so on. From age 5-12 it felt like there was a massive array of edutainment products, which disappeared as I hit high school. I remember trying to convince my teacher at age 9 that Escape Velocity was educational as it taught you to buy low and sell high.

So as a teenager, nothing. Makes sense - teenagers are less pliable and enjoy this stuff less and want to go off and do their own thing.

But I am genuinely surprised edutainment never really took off, or doesn't seem to have surpassed its 90s-early 00s peak. I would've assumed there was a lot of demand for this sort of product for adults, but instead we just reverted to video games sans education.

Am I wrong about this? Are there a bunch of super popular products I'm just not aware of? Or if not, why did it never take off? Entertaining yourself while learning is a big market, but maybe it's not entertaining enough so unless you're choosing it for someone else (like a child) you don't? I'm not sure, but feel free to chime in with thoughts or the like.

There's a whole bunch of edutainment on YouTube. Cooking shows, history shows, DIY shows, general knowledge shows. I haven't seen any edutainment fiction, though.

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