Edutainment: A Creative Solution for School-Based Preventive Screening Orientation in Missouri

School nurses provide routine formal vision and hearing health screenings to school children. However, time available during the school day for nurses to visit elementary classrooms and conduct pre-screening education and orientation is limited. A group of school nurses in Missouri needed an age-appropriate and time-saving method to introduce and orient children to the equipment, materials, and procedures that will be used on screening day. The school nurses collaborated with a health education specialist at a state university to develop two e-learning edutainment programs (one for vision screening and one for hearing screening) following best practices for educational design of e-learning programs. Edutainment is an e-learning technology that mixes education and entertainment using sound, video, and pictures. Edutainment is used to attract student attention through an enjoyable computer-based interaction to encourage focus on lesson content. The edutainment programs developed can be used by students at their own pace on their school-provided or personal devices, and/or the teacher can play the program module to the entire class as a group activity.