The Next Generation of Edutainment Applications for Young Children—A Proposal

ABSTRACT

Edutainment applications are a type of software that is designed to be entertaining while also being educational. In the current COVID-19 pandemic context, when children have to stay home due to the social distancing rules, edutainment applications for young children are more and more used each day. However, are these applications ready to take the place of an in-person teacher? In this paper, we propose a new generation of edutainment applications that are more suitable for preschoolers (aged 3–6 years old in our country) and closer to the in-person student–teacher interaction emotions aware edutainment applications. We discuss the most important challenges that must be overcome in developing this kind of applications (i.e., recognizing children’s emotions, enhancing the edutainment application with emotion awareness, and adapting the interaction flow) and the first steps that we have taken for developing them.