Today, technological advancements, transmedia expansion, and changing media consumption patterns have transformed media from information-delivery tools into active agents in education. These developments have reshaped adolescents’ media experiences, turning them into selective, interactive, and content-producing audiences and necessitating a reconsideration of programming practices for this age group. Within this ecosystem, edutainment has emerged over five decades as a media paradigm integrating entertainment and education. Despite its application in Iran, adolescent television edutainment lacks clearly defined practical indicators and a coherent indigenous pattern.

Accordingly, this study employed an exploratory mixed-methods approach to design an indigenous pattern for edutainment-based television programming for adolescents. The qualitative phase involved in-depth interviews analyzed using systematic grounded theory, while the quantitative phase validated the final pattern through a survey and partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). The findings established a paradigmatic framework comprising causal conditions (7), contextual conditions (5), intervening factors (14), a core category (12), strategies (13), and consequences (4 main categories), yielding an indigenous pattern with satisfactory model fit.

The findings identify authentic understanding of adolescent audiences, content appeal, creative production, shortages of specialized human resources, intelligent distribution management, active interaction, and gamification as key components of the pattern. Implementing this pattern requires shifting from production-oriented to ecosystem-based approaches, from centralization to institutional networking, and from prescriptive audience perspectives to participatory, research-based approaches.