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Immersive virtual reality (IVR) is regarded as one of the contemporary technological innovations with rich educational potential. As a subset of IVR, spherical video‐based IVR (SV‐IVR) immerses users centrally in a human‐recorded real‐world environment, allowing them to explore the environment in any directions via mobile phones and cardboard goggles. We have proposed a pedagogical framework—Learner‐Immersed Virtual Interactive Expedition (LIVIE), which leverages SV‐IVR to integrate immersive and interactive virtual inquiry‐based fieldwork into learning and teaching of physical geography. Besides discussing the design of LIVIE, this paper reports on the quasi‐experimental study that we carried out to evaluate its pedagogical effectiveness. The research subjects were 566 students from upper, middle and lower academic‐category secondary schools in Hong Kong. The study showed that LIVIE had different degrees of positive effects on the high, moderate and low academic‐achieving subjects. Our work not only provides evidence for supporting wider adoption of LIVIE in geography education, but it also sheds light on how to design and implement the pedagogical use of SV‐IVR in school education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) is a lifesaving emergency procedure. To increase survival rates, it is recommended to increase the number of high school students who know how to perform CPR. We have developed an immersive "Virtual Reality (VR) Resuscitation Training" to train the theoretical knowledge of CPR in which trainees must save the life of the patient in a virtual environment. This paper presents a randomized controlled study with a pre‐posttest design to explore whether a VR enhanced curriculum improves high school students' theoretical CPR knowledge. Forty students without previous CPR experience in the past year were randomly assigned to either the VR group or the standard group. The VR group had a significant higher increase of correct answers in comparison with the Standard group. More importantly, the gain in score on taking the correct sequence of CPR steps was significant favouring the VR‐enhanced protocol over the Standard protocol. Therefore, the use of a VR training for CPR training appears to be an effective learning method for non‐medical students and may be of great value skilling high school students in becoming adequate CPR providers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]