Background: Students need to practice their hands-on skills when they are young to develop confidence for their future careers. Nowadays, iSTEAM (integrated science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics) contests provide opportunities for participants to experience meaningful and challenging hands-on tasks that may foster learning, and to…

In science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (STEAM), hands-on making is the interplay of the sensuous forces of object-free and object-related intelligence transcendence in the continual process of quality improvement. The present research involved the design of a STEAM contest that focuses on having students use hand tools to…

Background: Hands-on activities and makerspaces have rapidly gained popularity in recent years. One of the reasons for this is that they have the potential to stimulate interest and identity development in STEM or STEAM. Taiwan has organized many technology and science competitions for students to raise their interest and creativity in the past…

Background: The linkage between group members' characteristics, group cohesiveness, knowledge application, and competitive performance has rarely been studied. Purpose: This study aimed to explore the correlations among individual characteristics (i.e. prosociality), collective mind (i.e. collective efficacy and cohesiveness), and how these…

This study adapted a Chinese remote-associated game for team competition, and explored the correlates between self-efficacy in Chinese word learning, competitive anxiety, collective self-esteem in gameplay and flow experience. A total of 206 valid data was collected from fifth-grade students. The results of the confirmatory factor analysis and…

Interest in educational research can be categorised into situational interest (SI) and individual interest (II); the sequential phases of interest development for learning have long been recognised as triggered SI, maintained SI, emerging II, and well-developed II. This study proposes an interest development model which involves SI and II mentally…

According to social dilemma theory, students may be characterized as being indifferent to reciprocal behavior and disengaged from interacting with the board gaming process. Given a common goal, students' prosociality can affect the collective efficacy and goal achievement motivation that reflects their flow experience in a cooperative-competitive…

Educational games can be viewed in two ways, "learning to play" or "playing to learn." The Chinese Idiom String Up Game was specifically designed to examine the effect of "learning to play" on the interrelatedness of players' gameplay interest, competitive anxiety, and perceived utility of pre-game learning (PUPGL).…

The strong humanistic and ethics-oriented philosophy of Confucianism tends to lead people influenced by these principles to undervalue the importance of hands-on practice and creativity in education. GreenMech, a science and technology contest, was implemented to encourage real-world, hands-on problem solving in an attempt to mitigate this effect.…

Hands-on making (e.g., "Maker") has become prevalent in current educational settings. To understand the role that students' epistemic curiosity plays in hands-on making contests, this study explored its correlation to students' positive affect and continuance intention to participate in a hands-on making contest called…

Individual gameplay interest is affected by numerous factors and a competition setting is also of importance as there are factors that need to be managed. To understand the motivational variables related to an educational game competition, this study explored the interrelatedness between self-efficacy, competitive anxiety, and gameplay interest in…

Flow state in game playing affected by computer self-efficacy and game competitive anxiety was studied. In order to examine the effect of those constructs with high competition, this study select "Escaping from firing online game" which require college students to escape from fire and rescue people and eliminate the fire damage along the way of…

Do girls have more competition anxiety and exogenous cognitive load than equally able boys during the playing of stressful competitive on-line games? This question led to the adoption of a technology acceptance model to compare the influence factors of competitors in sequential and synchronous games. Confirmatory factor analysis of the data on 220…

A case study was undertaken in a junior high school that had won the highest award of the National PowerTech Contest in Taiwan. In the contest, students were required to create their own wooden robot (mechatronics project) in the morning and compete in the afternoon, in order to better avoid the intervention of parents and teachers in the process.…

The POWERTECH contest in Taiwan was established in an attempt to promote inventiveness and technology to elementary school pupils. The POWERTECH contest is designed as a collaborative learning system for project design. Project design is comprised of technical processes, which include the construction of an artifact and improvement of its…