Effects of the Mobile Competitive Game Approach on Students´ Learning Attitudes and Flow Experience in Field Trips

With the rapid progress of mobile technologies and the popularity of wireless networks, educational settings and strategies have changed significantly. Learning environments are no longer limited to classrooms, instead, the importance of conducting learning activities for knowledge construction through interaction with physical environments has been emphasized. In the meantime, researchers have indicated that cultivating students´ learning motivation can facilitate their learning performance, and the digital game-based learning approach could provide a good solution for effectively enhancing students´ learning motivation. Therefore, in this study, a mobile competitive game is proposed to support learning activities conducted in physical contexts. An experiment has been conducted on an elementary school butterfly ecology course to explore the effectiveness of the proposed approach in comparison with the conventional mobile learning approach. The experimental results show that the mobile competitive game approach can not only improve students´ learning attitudes, but can also situates them in learning scenarios with good flow experience.