Edutainment may be considered a developing contemporary research field particularly as new and open source game development environments are made available to the research community. Nevertheless, most edutainment scenarios are usually limited in terms of interactivity, design and aesthetics, a fact that may be attributed to the task complexity, which requires an integrated approach addressing all related fields. This work introduces a conceptual/operational framework for the development of edutainment scenarios, which is both game-based and rich-media oriented. The proposed framework, which for the main part must be considered an educational effort, combines theoretical background -within the fields of human-computer communication, interaction/educational design and entertainment studies- and practical solutions and techniques regarding software and digital games development, for the creation of custom edutainment scenarios. These abstract and more or less theoretical scenarios due to the seamless embodiment of technical practices may be easily developed as fully fledged products, be them games, applications or any kind of digital media that provide the unified service of education and entertainment. In such a case the end product (a digital system) permits the user to interact with the environment in a game-like manner, which enhances learnability and contributes to knowledge acquirement as the underlying objective. The framework, although not a rigid one but rather subjected to ad hoc adjustments, consists of well-defined stages, which include modern educational theories and state-of-the-art development environments. This paper describes in details the proposed educational framework for the edutainment scenarios and presents a recent case study that validates its effectiveness. Despite the fact that the framework is still under development in a continuous feedback process with respect to the scenarios conceived by higher education students who utilise it, the results achieved so far are rather encouraging in terms of creativity, interaction design and aesthetics, thus addressing in a satisfactory manner the above mentioned deficiencies which -in our opinion- characterise a large portion of commercial edutainment scenarios
