Abstract
The extreme apprenticeship instructional methodology, recently born in Scandinavia, serves to organise education in formal contexts, such as university courses. The fundamental idea is that a new task is learned by apprentices by looking at the master who is performing it, and then repeating the task under his or her guidance. Continuous feedback and learning by doing are key principles of extreme apprenticeship. However, in e-learning contexts, the direct contact with the master may be missing. Then engagement of students with learning material becomes a challenging goal to achieve when designing the material. In this paper, we see how extreme apprenticeship and playful design were combined for designing the learning material of the laboratories of a 'boring' university course, namely, operating systems. A preliminary analytic evaluation concludes the paper showing the viability of the blended approach. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.