What Is Edutainment and Why Is It Making a Comeback?

Q: What is edutainment and why is it making a comeback?

Edutainment is learning content delivered through entertainment formats — game shows, video, story, play — instead of a lecture or a slide deck. It's making a comeback in 2026 because attention spans are short, straight lecture is failing to hold a room, and audiences remember what they participated in far longer than what they were merely told.

Running this with a class? SideHustle is free to play, needs no student accounts, and fits a class period. Get the game and the printable rules - we email you the link.

What edutainment actually looks like

Edutainment isn't a buzzword for "fun worksheets." It's a design choice: take the content a lecture would deliver and route it through a format with stakes, roles, and feedback instead. A game show has rounds and scores. A simulation has consequences. A story has a character the audience roots for. All three create the same effect a good lecture almost never does — the learner is doing something, not just receiving something.

The mechanism is participation, not entertainment for its own sake. When someone pitches an idea and gets scored on it in front of a room, they remember the room. When someone watches a slide about "the importance of pitching," they remember almost nothing by the following week. That gap is the entire case for edutainment.

Why it's making a comeback in 2026

Lecture has been losing ground for a decade, but 2026 is the year a critical mass of educators and trainers are treating entertainment as a serious delivery mechanism rather than a gimmick. A few forces are converging:

• Attention is the scarcest resource in any room. Whatever format wins attention wins retention, and lecture is losing that fight to shorter, faster, more participatory formats everywhere else in people's lives.
• The lecture model was never built for retention — it was built for coverage. It's efficient at getting through material, not at making material stick. Entertainment formats sacrifice some coverage for a lot more retention, and for most audiences that trade is worth it.
• The workforce and the classroom both expect to participate. Cohorts who grew up with interactive media tolerate one-way delivery less than any generation before them, and they show up differently when a session asks something of them.

None of this means lecture disappears. It means the sessions built to actually change behavior — not just transfer facts — increasingly borrow structure from entertainment: rounds, scoring, roles, stakes.

Edutainment in entrepreneurship education

Entrepreneurship is one of the clearest cases for edutainment, because pitching is inherently a performance skill — you can't lecture someone into being good at thinking on their feet in front of a room. SideHustle's Labs format is a working example built specifically for schools: a 60 to 90 minute facilitated session teachers run themselves, with 4 to 5 students per team, four rounds of brainstorm-pitch-score-rotate, and Funny + Fundable scoring that forces teams to weigh humor against a real business case. It's a different product from SideHustle's ticketed comedy show — Labs is built for the classroom, run by the teacher, with students pitching to peer "investors." See what SideHustle Labs is for the full breakdown of how a class period runs.

Independent of any formal program, educators have found their own way to the free online SideHustle game and brought it into their classrooms without anyone asking them to. A Mars Hill University professor ran it with his class. A teacher in Vigo County, Indiana ran it with roughly 400 middle-school students. Neither was part of a sales process — they found a free format that made a hard-to-teach skill stick, and they used it. That's edutainment working exactly as designed: a teacher chooses entertainment because it out-performs the alternative, not because a vendor convinced them to.

For the full educator playbook — how to structure a session, common mistakes, and how to adapt the format to different grade levels — see the educator guide to teaching entrepreneurship through play.

Edutainment isn't only for classrooms

The same mechanics show up on the adult side. SideHustle LIVE — the 60 to 90 minute comedy game show co-hosted by Darby Rollins and Tomer Soran — puts opted-in founders and professional improv comedians on stage to pitch fictional businesses to a room of founders and business decision-makers, scored the same way: Funny + Fundable. Nobody is pulled out of their seat; participation on stage is entirely voluntary, and the rest of the room plays and scores from cabaret tables. It's the same underlying insight as Labs and the free game — a room remembers what it judged and laughed through — aimed at a professional adult audience instead of a classroom.

What it means for you

If you teach, train, or design any kind of learning program, take edutainment seriously as a delivery mechanism, not a novelty. A well-designed entertainment-based session asks the room to participate instead of just sit and receive, which is the same reason the educators above kept coming back to it on their own. Start small: add a scoring mechanic, a rotation, or a stake to one session you already run, and watch what changes about how the room behaves.

Try it

• Play free at playsidehustle.com
• See us live: Sept 25 at Pershing Hall in Austin (7-year anniversary show). luma.com/playsidehustle

Try SideHustle free with your students

SideHustle is edutainment: students pitch funny and fundable business ideas and learn to think on their feet, no slides and no worksheets. It runs in a single class period and scales from a handful of students to a whole grade. Opt in to play free and bring it to class this week.