Formative evaluation of immersive virtual reality expedition mini-games to facilitate computational thinking

Recently, virtual reality (VR) technology has shown great potential in advancing education with many pedagogical benefits for building the 21st-century teaching and learning experience. This study conducted a formative evaluation of an immersive VR expedition application with the aim of understanding users' learning processes and how the application facilitates higher education students' computational thinking skills. Six participants were randomly selected to conduct this evaluation. A mixed research approach consisting of quantitative and qualitative methods was employed. The study quantitatively analyzed users' scores from gameplay to understand how the intervention supported computational thinking skills. Participants were also interviewed to collect data after playing the mini-games to investigate users' experiences. The study showcases players' computational thinking competency, assessed automatically during gameplay. Further, this study used inductive content analysis to demonstrate users' reactions to prototyped VR mini-games. The qualitative findings suggest that users found the VR mini-games interactive and immersive, which provided an opportunity to foster learners' computational thinking skills. The quantitative analysis revealed that student's computational thinking competency can be enhanced through consistent playing of the mini-games. Moreover, the expedition aspect of the VR game stimulated learners' curiosity, which sustained their learning progress. Furthermore, users gained new knowledge and found the mini-games educative. Nevertheless, several aspects of the VR mini-games need improvements, according to users' perceptions. This study contributes to the knowledge in terms of the affordances of VR in education research and provides relevant insights that can shape future studies, for example, the recent hype of metaverse in education.