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Virtual contexts play a crucial role in assisting students' learning. Researchers have taken advantage of the potential of immersive virtual reality (VR) for situating students in inaccessible places, and for engaging them in learning activities. Meanwhile, several previous studies have reported that, in VR-based learning contexts, students' perception of immersion and learning motivation could be low owing to the lack of clear objectives and problem-solving scenarios. On the other hand, digital game-based learning is capable of enhancing students' engagement in a task. In this study, we designed a learning approach (namely RPG-VR) by means of integrating a role-playing game with VR technology to enhance students' science learning. Furthermore, a quasi-experiment was conducted to evaluate the students' learning effectiveness via, respectively, providing the RPG-VR learning approach and the conventional VR (called C-VR) learning approach for the experimental and control groups. The experimental results indicated that this approach significantly enhanced the students' perceptions of immersion, self-efficacy and extrinsic learning motivation, in comparison with the C-VR learning approach. Specifically, students who learned with the RPG-VR learning approach perceived more immersion in the engagement and the total immersion stages. This study contributes to existing knowledge of VR technology by providing that a digital role-playing game could reinforce the main characteristics of VR-based learning environments and enhance students' concentration on a learning task. However, no significant difference was found between the two groups in terms of promoting students' learning achievements, implying that more instructional assistance is needed to improve students' knowledge gains in VR-based learning environments.

Developing students' scientific literacy is the most important educational goal and challenge of the 21st century. Many studies have confirmed that flipped learning has significantly impacted learning science. Researchers indicate that the lack of an appropriate learning guidance strategy in the pre-class stage for flipped learning will influence students' understanding of learning content and affect in-class learning activities. In order to tackle this problem, the present study proposed a flipped learning approach based on identification, summarization, self-reflective questioning, and application (ISSA), further exploring the influences on students' scientific literacy, communication tendency, problem-solving tendency, learning motivation, and cognitive load. In addition, the study used a true experimental design to assess the effectiveness of the proposed learning method, and 58 university students were recruited to participate in a natural science course. The experimental group (N = 29) adopted the proposed learning approach, while the control group adopted the conventional flipped learning approach. The results showed that the experimental group had higher scientific literacy, communication tendency, problem-solving tendency, and extrinsic motivation than the control group. The interviews showed that the ISSA flipped learning method could improve students' understanding of the learning content. In particular, the process of peer interaction promoted their self-reflection and scientific literacy skills.

Computational thinking (CT) has gained considerable attention and in-depth discussion over the last two decades. Although the significance of CT has been highlighted, it could be challenging for educators to teach CT. Fortunately, adopting robots in education has been evidenced to be of benefit to promoting students' learning motivation, CT, and higher-order thinking skills. However, several significant factors affecting students' programming performances in robot-assisted learning activities have been identified, such as cognitive needs and organization. In this study, a CMR-BBP (concept map robot block-based programming) approach was designed by integrating concept maps into robot block-based programming to enhance students' programming learning. Moreover, a three-group experiment was carried out in an elementary school to evaluate their learning outcomes. The experimental results revealed that the CMR-BBP approach benefited the students' perceptions of their computational thinking and problem solving in comparison with the R-BBP (robot block-based programming) and C-BBP (conventional block-based programming) approaches. Furthermore, regarding cognitive load, both the CMR-BBP and R-BBP approaches enhanced the students' germane cognitive load, while the CMR-BBP approach effectively reduced their extrinsic cognitive load. This study could be a notable reference for designing other courses in conjunction with programming learning activities.