Edutainment on YouTube: Tom Scott channel

1.Introduction: Youtube has emerged as the largest video platform website, presenting a wide array of educational and entertainment contents that can have an auxiliary role in technological education where language used combines the playful and the educational contexts. Technological literacy is hereby identified as a new competence in contemporary schools and society. 2.Methodology: The following study aims to explore a Youtube channel that hosts educational content together with entertainment issues. Four videos were collected from the Tom Scott Youtube channel as a small corpus selected to understand whether one could elicit elements of technological literacy from initially dedicated entertainment contents. 3. Content Analysis: The videos were analysed with data from SocialBlade to understand their position in the Youtube platform and the evolution of the channel, in terms of audience. The McRoberts Model (2016) was adapted to provide adequate insight about the selected videos. 4. Findings: The analysed videos demonstrated that Tom Scott adopts a style to increase engagement and viewership with young audiences, leading to educational highlights addressing art and technology along with entertaining layouts. 5. Conclusion: The perception prevails that technological literacy refers to the use of technological tools, regardless of the importance of the whole social aspects of new technologies (Dakers, 2006). By bonding education and entertainment, edutainment not only educates but also amuses those who explore it because there is a style in it that seeks to educate in a less formal environment (Fossad, 2008). Youtube has taken this concept even further and expanded it to an even larger audience whilst opening doors to new creators who publish educational videos. Therefore, as a social network, Youtube presents an opportunity for expanding edutainment content, and becomes more accessible to those who watch and create new contents.