The tight connection which occurs between entertainment and education has originated what is defined edutainment which can be considered as a continuous and innovative brain-training, which stimulates, in an interactive way, the capacity to combine attention and motivation to explore and learn. The role of games in learning is a common topic in research. The various games linked to the edutainment mechanism, in particular, have been analyzed to understand in what way and to which extent they can facilitate study, development of memory, attention, motivation and other cognitive processes as well as spatial abilities. The aim is the definition of “edutainment” as a branch of e-learning which promotes learning process in school, extra-school and didactic field in general, in a playful way, through multimedia applications. The idea of encouraging the integration of game, technology and learning is new and at the same time complex for its educational aims. At international level, United States Department of Education, with the cooperation of educational agents and teachers, recently developed a statistical table of the results reached by an important project for the creation of modules for the learning through Internet. Shown below there are information about the results of this project that were used to be transferred on a national level to start and implement the same project. The interactive technologies, really because they turn the users into actors, they can involve and entertain reducing the gap between the teacher/communicator, standing out as leader of knowledge, and the pupil receiving the information.

In modern society about 10% of children suffer from a neuro-developmental disorder called dyslexia, which implies difficulties in learning to read. According to recent research, playing action videogames can be a valid teaching tool to improve the reading skills of dyslexic children through forms of engagement and interaction. This paper describes the design, implementation, validation and experimentation of an educational action game oriented to promote phonological and visuo-spatial attention training in dyslexic subjects aged between 7 and 9.

This work argues how the cognitive processes involved in the orienteering peculiar activities (map reading, path finding, and spatial thinking) are also involved in the management of intersubjective relationship. In essence, the skills involved in reading maps and in developing strategies for spatial navigation are skills that allow us to see the world from different points of view, abandoning the egocentric perspective. To get out from egocentrism means being able to see the reality from several points of view, however other than our own. In this perspective, the work develops describing orienteering as a sport, and facing a review of scientific literature on the cognitive processes involved in spatial navigation and management of spatial reference systems, in light of the contribution made to this specific field studies from neuroscience. The work thus illustrates the spatial theory of empathy and concludes with a proposal for the spread of orienteering as an effective teaching practice in inclusion-oriented education contexts and as a powerful learning resource for Special Educational Needs.

The New Frontiers of Edutainment: The Development of an Educational and Socio-Cultural Phenomenon Over time of Globalization

The ability to play action videogames – not directly related to phonological or orthographic training – seems to be a teaching tool able to intervene specifically on spatial attention and drastically improve the reading skills of dyslexic children. The MADRIGALE project aims at the design and development of an action game, simultaneously involving both phonological and attention training in order to adapt educational game strategies for special needs. Within the MADRIGALE project, the design of the prototype was presented at the International Conference on Intelligent Networking and Collaborative Systems, while an experimentation about educational effectiveness of the prototype, conducted using ‘Prove MT2’ as a benchmarking tool for measuring accuracy and speed of reading, was published in the International Journal of Emerging Technologies in Learning (iJET). This paper is an extension of the work presented in SIREM – SIEL 2014 Conference, and presents the results of a Game Evaluation Sheet administered to 50 primary school teachers with experience of dyslexic students

The use of information age technology favors pervasive communication exchanges and complex phenomenologies, which affect the production of knowledge and the permanent transformation of personalities and contexts, not always with a view to prosocial empowerment of differences. From the analysis of the liquid socio–psycho–educational frames explored in the research activated at the University of Salerno, the permanent need for a widespread media education emerges, to be rooted in a lifelong learning vision to achieve systemic inclusiveness. This is the basis of the epistemology of the existential design model Flipped Inclusion, promoted and tested at the University of Salerno, whose complex idiomatic phrase constitutes the integrated and complex synthesis of the multi-perspective and multimodal approach pursued by the model. In the exploratory–descriptive–transformative research underway since 2014, through blended learning, complex blended learning and with formal, non-formal and informal contexts, the design–organizational, algorithmic–computational architecture of flipped inclusion is experimented upon. The trend of data since 2014 confirms the educational value of the model, due to the positive impact relating to inclusiveness on personal styles and social contexts, hence the intention to continue research on larger samples.