“What Real Engagement Looks Like”
Charting the future of edutainment
Press play to explore the interactive edutainment report
by Brock Horning | August 2026
It’s a noticeable shift in audience behavior that has led to the unstoppable rise of edutainment – the perfect blend of education and entertainment. This well-established approach to learning has suddenly become more attainable for learning teams and creators as new technologies arrive, such as Stornaway.io. Content can adapt to the individual, learning materials can be personalized to address knowledge gaps, learning journeys can be recorded and measured – and all in real time.
In our age of interactive media, learners expect more. They expect to participate and have agency over their learning journey. They expect media to adapt itself to their individual needs and requirements. And, most crucially, they expect it to engage as well as educate.
As learning teams and designers get their heads around all the new possibilities, we brought eight senior leaders in education and innovation together to chart the future of edutainment. Here are just three insights from this fascinating conversation:
In brief: where edutainment is improving learning
Across these eight senior leaders working in education, broadcast, healthcare and museums, some key patterns and trends emerged.
- From broadcast to participation and personalization. Rather than a one-way broadcast given to a universal audience, educators are looking for new ways to give the learner agency. Inviting participation and allowing personalization is increasing engagement.
- From production polish to authentic connection. Fostering an emotional connection through effective storytelling and genuine human experiences is sparking the curiosity that draws real interest from learners.
- From fact-driven to story-driven learning. It’s okay for education to be entertaining. Utilising edutainment devices such as humour and gamification can deliver real results – but only for the right topics.
Yes, it’s okay for education to be entertaining
Xand van Tulleken is well-known to parents and children alike as half the presenting duo behind kids’ medical show, Operation Ouch! Over the last 15 years, this unique TV show has taken a fun and funny approach to exploring the ins and outs of the human body for younger audiences. But this wasn’t always the case.
BBC presenter, Xand van Tulleken
“The first series is not funny,” Xand recalls. “We didn’t understand that it was okay to be funny, and that sounds daft now. For the links, we used to walk through the doors in the hospital and go “coming up next on Operation Ouch!” and we’d do retakes if we didn’t say it in time.”
Learning is a serious business, but that doesn’t mean the classroom must be a sombre place. For many, an enforced schooling system has meant that learning is associated with boredom and tedium rather than curiosity and exploration. The realisation is growing that if a learner is having fun, they will pay closer attention, take it all in and remember more of it afterwards.
“The entertainment bit now seems so important to me,” Xand continues. “I don’t see why adults wouldn’t also want to be engaged and entertained with comedy as they learn. It’s quite a core emotional response, even for more serious topics.”
A very visible example of this new approach is the airplane safety video. As Matt Brandon, Series Producer for BBC Natural History, mentions: “It makes me think of the safety videos on planes. They were the dullest thing in the world, and now they’re all doing something different.”
Deliver emotional connection not production polish
AI-generated video has become commonplace and the ability to deliver high-production polish is easier than ever before. In response, audiences are noticeably shifting towards authentic, human voices with a clear perspective.
Matt Brandon, BBC Natural History Producer
“For Natural History audiences, the sense of wonder has changed when perfectly-presented CGI-generated animals are also readily available,” BBC Natural History producer Matt Brandon explains. “We need to couple discovery with real storytelling. Storytelling is all about the emotional connection we can create with an audience. I want to hear a person’s point of view. I want to be on their shoulder.”
A single training video or learning material is unlikely to be remembered in its entirety, but what if it sparks curiosity? What if it sets off a genuine sense of warmth and connection for a specific topic that outlasts that single video? This emotional connection can be the beginning of a truly engaged learning journey.
“A lot of Operation Ouch is about going, “biology doesn’t need to be terrifying or miserable, “ Xand agrees. “It can be nice, interesting and funny. Hospitals can be places where you can see doctors being relaxed and ordinary and not sort of people buzzing around and white coats.”
Ask ‘how do you learn best?’ and adapt the experience to match
Across all the organisations represented at the roundtable, every one highlighted a focus on gaining a better understanding of their audience. Who are they and how do they like to learn?
As Digital Innovations Director at Springer Health+, Jules Morgan is looking for ways to update healthcare specialists with the latest medical knowledge in their field. Even here, there is a challenge to keep viewers engaged in these detailed and complex topics. “We are always asking why don’t they carry on watching? What is stopping viewers from watching the full video? Is it because they’ve heard it all before? Is it because they’re finding it boring? Is it not relevant? What exactly is it?”
This desire to understand the audience is also reshaping how content itself is built. Rebecca Atkinson, creator of Mixmups and Ultra Access™, argues that real personalisation means letting learners decide how they take content in. She uses the analogy of a sandwich counter: “In TV, we build layers of visual sound effects, subtitles, music, dialogue, and then we compress that into a single file … you have to ingest it just as the programme maker has made it. So with Ultra Access™, what you’re essentially doing is creating a sandwich counter.”
Rebecca Atkinson, Children’s TV producer and creator of Mixmups
Asking these very questions brought about a key shift for Operation Ouch! “One of the big changes has been the inclusion of kids voices,” Xand says. “Kids want to watch the other kids. We’ve learned this from kids on YouTube – they like to watch other kids. And so as a presenter, my role has completely changed to delivering the gags, covering the science and facilitating and narrating the kids telling their own stories.”
To allow this to happen, educators have to be prepared to give audiences agency and encourage participation. As Nick Dyson succinctly put it: “You have to relinquish the room. To be edutaining, a teacher has to give up a bit of space so that something even better can fill it.”
For Justin Rhodes, Learning and Engagement Producer at the Imperial War Museums, opening up new edutainment opportunities has brought new ways for learners to demonstrate their understanding. “We gave Key Stage 2 students a documentary challenge,” he says. “They become ‘documentary makers’ and are given a camera and prompts to build up their own stories. Giving this agency is really key to getting them to interact in a meaningful way with display objects and to the stories from really difficult subject matter.”
Phil Birchinall. Senior Director, Immersive Content, Discovery Education
Ultimately, the aim is to find the most relatable and memorable way to immerse learners in the subject matter. As Phil Birchinall, Senior Director at Discovery Education, explains: “We often talk about immersion as being the learning amplifier – that thing that actually does make something memorable. It also shortens the distance between not knowing and knowing. And it can amplify the depth of what you’ve just learned too. So doing it right can really pay dividends.”