Xiaopeng Zhang - Böcker

With the widespread interest in digital entertainment and the advances in the tech- logies of computer graphics, multimedia and virtual reality technologies, a new area–– “Edutainment”––has been accepted as a union of education and computer entertainment. Edutainment is recognized as an effective way of learning through a medium, such as a computer, software, games or VR applications, that both educates and entertains. The Edutainment conference series was established and followed as a special event for the new interests in e-learning and digital entertainment. The main purpose of Edutainment conferences is the discussion, presentation, and information exchange of scientific and technological developments in the new community. The Edutainment conference series is a very interesting opportunity for researchers, engineers and graduate students who wish to communicate at these international annual events. The conference series includes plenary invited talks, workshops, tutorials, paper presen- tion tracks and panel discussions. The Edutainment conference series was initiated in Hangzhou, China in 2006. Following the success of the first event (Edutainment 2006 in Hangzhou, China) and the second one (Edutainment 2007 in Hong Kong, China), Edutainment 2008 was held June 25–27, 2007 in Nanjing, China. This year, we received 219 submissions from 26 different countries and regions, including United Arab Emirates, Canada, Thailand, New Zealand, Austria, Turkey, Germany, Switzerland, Brazil, Cuba, Australia, Hong Kong (China), Pakistan, M- ico, Czech Republic, USA, Malaysia, Italy, Spain, France, UK, The Netherlands, Taiwan (China), Japan, South Korea, and China.

E-learning and digital entertainment techniques, tools and systems are becoming popular and can be found in many real-world educational applications in many co- tries. The driving force behind these technologies is the rapidly growing requirements of edutainment, especially from the perspective of the users. This has led to the increasing interest of researchers in this area. The articles in this issue give a rich overview of how edutainment technologies can be creatively used for training and education purposes. The first 12 articles of this issue represent a selection of outstanding contributions from Edutainment 2010, the 5th International Conference on E-learning and Games, held in Changchun, China, in August 2010. The main purpose of this event is to faci- tate the discussion, presentation, and information exchange on the scientific and te- nological developments in the emerging field of digital entertainment techniques and systems for education. These 12 papers concentrated on three aspects: e-learning s- tem and applications, game techniques for learning, and virtual reality techniques for entertainment. They are closely related to the topics of this journal.