This study examines the impact of English anxiety on learning outcomes in digital game-based learning (DGBL) for English pronunciation. While language anxiety is known to hinder learning, its effects in DGBL contexts remain underexplored. To address this, a DGBL system was developed, and an experiment involving 56 non-English major university students was conducted. Participants were categorized into a high anxiety group (HAG) and a low anxiety group (LAG) based on an English anxiety scale. Data were collected through pronunciation tests, motivation 3and flow state scales, and badge performance logs. Results showed significant pronunciation improvement in both groups, with no significant differences between them. Notably, the HAG outperformed the LAG in badge performance related to listening and pronunciation practice. Both groups reported comparable motivation and flow experience. These findings highlight the importance of considering anxiety levels in DGBL design and suggest the value of personalized systems to support diverse learner needs.

Despite a growing body of literature on performance goals and learning, limited studies have explored their influence on English translation education within the context of Digital Game-Based Learning (DGBL). To address this gap, this study developed a DGBL system to assist students in learning English translation techniques, and compared the effects of students’ different performance goal orientations (performance-approach versus performance-avoidance goals) on their learning performance, in-game performance, self-efficacy, fear of failure, and learning perceptions. The participants were 56 university students, who were divided into a performance-approach group (PAPG) and a performance-avoidance group (PAVG). The study used quantitative analysis with data from English translation technique tests, log data from gaming sessions, and three questionnaires. It was found that the PAPG exhibited significant improvements in relatively difficult translation techniques (i.e., conversion), while the PAVG showed notable improvements in relatively simple translation techniques (i.e., polysemy). Furthermore, the PAPG outperformed the PAVG in in-game performance related to polysemy. This study enhances our understanding of the impact of performance goal orientations on both learning and in-game performance in English translation education, particularly within the context of DGBL.

This study developed a digital game-based learning system featuring three different badge mechanisms: expected badges, unexpected badges, and mixed badges. An experiment was conducted to investigate how these badge mechanisms affected both English pronunciation learning performance and in-game behavior. Sixty students participated in the study and were randomly assigned to one of three groups: the expected badge group (EBG), the unexpected badge group (UBG), and the mixed badge group (MBG). The results showed that learners across all badge groups significantly improved their English pronunciation learning performance. Moreover, learners in the MBG and EBG outperformed those in the UBG. Additionally, MBG learners surpassed UBG learners in most in-game behavior metrics. These findings suggest that integrating unexpected badges with expected ones can produce more pronounced effects, leveraging the benefits of both types of badges. Conversely, relying solely on unexpected badges may not yield such significant results.

Environmental education has been conducted to equip learners with relevant environmental conservation knowledge for many years. However, learners seldom put the knowledge into practice and even have few ideas about how to protect the earth. Accordingly, continuous attention to this issue is necessary to enhance the effectiveness of environmental education. One of the strategies is gamification through technological application, which could enhance learning interaction and motivation with learners. The current study developed an online environment with the concept of escape room in the experimental group on the basis of a gamification strategy. With the immersion of the escape room, learners were encouraged to protect nature in a playful and challenging way. This empirical study was implemented to examine whether the online environment could promote learners' understanding and motivation. Our findings showed that the learners' performance in experimental group was significantly higher than that in the control group, highlighting the effectiveness of the digital escape room in enhancing learning performance. Nevertheless, there were no statistically significant differences in motivation between the groups, although the experimental group exhibited consistently higher mean motivation scores, suggesting a positive trend that warrants further research.

Fetal appearance and proper position evaluation are crucial for determining the best labor treatments. Healthcare or midwifery nurses, require knowledge about the fetus's position and health to make decisions on whether to induce labor. In addition, attending to the patient's needs throughout labor is essential. The fetal positioning and monitoring process may be uncovered with the use of Leopold's techniques. Students find it challenging to apply what they learn in the classroom to real-world challenges since standard training lacks chances for clinical experience and application. This study aims to investigate the impact of integrating online game-based environments with gamification and a self-regulated learning (SRL) strategy on nursing students' Leopold's maneuvers skills. The use of games as a learning tool in education has gained popularity due to its ability to provide a playful and motivating experience for students, as well as fostering cooperation among them. However, the application of game-based learning and gamification in nursing skill instruction remains understudied. The researchers propose integrating an online game-based environment called Gather with gamification features and a self-regulated learning strategy for nursing students. The self-regulated learning approach in this study includes goal setting, performing tasks with gamification elements such as points, badge, leaderboards, and self-evaluation. An experiment will be conducted at a nursing school in a Taiwan university using a quasi-experimental design to investigate the learning performance, motivation, self-efficacy and perceptions.

Previous studies have shown that trait emotional intelligence (EI) is an important factor affecting children’s learning performance in physical instruction settings. However, there have been very few studies exploring the effects of children’s high- or low-trait EI levels on both gaming performance and learning performance in digital game-based learning environments. Therefore, in this study, we developed a game-based English learning environment to investigate how different levels of trait EI would affect children’s gaming performance and learning performance. A total of 51 third-grade elementary school students participated in this study. The students’ trait EI was measured by a modified version of the Trait EI Questionnaire-Child Form. The students’ gaming performance was evaluated by the achievement of badges, and their learning performance was assessed by a paper-based examination after playing the game. The collected data were analyzed using Pearson correlation analysis and independent samples t tests. The results showed that there were significant correlations between trait EI, gaming performance, and learning performance; this implies that trait EI had a significant relationship with both gaming performance and learning performance. Moreover, the results showed that there was a significant correlation between the gaming performance and learning performance for those students with low-trait EI. However, the results showed that gaming performance and learning performance were not significantly correlated for the high-trait EI students. A subsequent analysis showed that the high-trait EI students’ gaming performance and learning performance were significantly better than those with low-trait EI.

Language and culture are inseparable since individuals express themselves out of their cultural background, thus highlighting the importance of the cultural cultivation. Research has shown the positive effects of embedding foreign cultures in the writing process. However, intercultural competence is still not adequately reflected in current English as a foreign language (EFL) education. In addition, students feel demotivated to write in conventional writing courses, thus signifying an urgent call for innovation. As writing instructions that incorporate intercultural competence are insufficiently implemented, the current study, therefore, aimed to examine how EFL learners’ intercultural sensitivity could be enhanced via the use of a cross-border writing instruction. A total of 44 sophomore English-majors in two required English Composition classes were respectively paired up with their American peers from a public liberal arts college. Data included students’ responses to “Intercultural Sensitivity Scale” and focus-group interviews. The findings revealed positive affordances from the crossborder writing instruction, that pre-class activities (reading relevant materials, answering comprehension questions online, reviewing instructional videos) and online interaction with foreign peers enhanced the students’ intercultural sensitivity. The participants held positive perceptions about the intercultural experience with foreign partners and such learning experience enhanced observation of the similarities as well as differences of diverse cultures.

In this paper, we present a driving license test APP system for traffic education. The system provides learning materials and the adaptive simulation quiz. Questions in the quiz are individually generated according to the user profile and the designed boosting algorithm. The experimental result revealed that our APP system showed statistically significant better score in the driving license exam.

In recent years, a growing number of studies have been conducted on the individual differences in digital game-based learning (DGBL). Despite this growing interest, there is a lack of sound empirical evidence on individual differences (e.g., gender differences) in flow state in achievement systems in English learning environments. This study investigated whether any gender differences existed in such a system. To this end, the current study developed an achievement system including a reward mechanism-based design with learning features (i.e., interaction and rewards for correct answers) to facilitate English learning. An experiment was conducted. A total of 50 respondents participated in the study. Data were analyzed using independent sample t-tests. The results revealed that the female respondents had significantly higher mean scores for flow state than the males.

The study was designed to offer an extended thread of speaking practice and performance with regard to in-class instruction and after-class exercise in EFL learning environment. To allow students to outspread speaking practice in class, an implementation of asynchronous computer-mediated communication in terms of audioblog was utilized to manage the after-class speaking practice and performance. In the meanwhile, individual difference has been seen as one of the most affected factors to shape learning, such as feature of personality. Thus, the study intended to understand the impact of personality trait would react on audioblog use for speaking performance in English, and the product of the presentation of speaking performance on audioblog. Two research questions were managed as R1: how does personality trait influence students’ speaking performance on audioblogs? R2: how do students with different personality trait manage the speaking performance on audioblogs? The participants were three hundred and twenty one male high school students. They were taking an English speaking class for a semester and recruited in the study. After each thematic speaking class, they were instructed to accomplish one thematic speaking performance and post it on their audioblogs accordingly. A mixed method of quantitative and qualitative was analyzed to collect the responses from the students with different personality trait. A few of affected matters from students, as well as the overall presentation of speaking performance on audioblog were gathered for data analysis. The findings of the study showed students with different personality trait affected distinctly on confidence and willingness in English after engaging with audioblog for speaking performance. Those who were inclined to be introverted showed the potential to accomplish more speaking performance than those who were more extroverted. In addition, the implementation of speaking performance on audioblog seemed to significantly influence students’ willingness in English after a long-period engagement, particularly to the introverted ones. On the other hand, the overall presentation of students’ performances on audioblogs revealed an astounding achievement that not only for the recording style but also the presentation format, and either extroverted or introverted students were apt to favor some presentation formats by the trait of personality.

Reading news is one of the most important learning activities in the education of the communication schools. Learners learn to improve the awareness and writing essay ability through observing contents inside the news. How to create the learning materials in a short time is still a gap between traditional communication education and information technology. In addition, the most challenge is that there embeds a huge amount of commercial ads and external links within a news page which usually mislead learners to read and explore further topics. To solve this, in this paper, we proposed a clean and pure news reading environment which makes it possible to touch up-to-date global news in our news corpus. It automatically crawls the daily news through the web without additional human effort. To preserve the news content, we also design a content extraction algorithm to keep the news content in the database is clean to read. Instructors can easily prepare and organize a set of news topics in this platform.

The study was conducted to advance EFL speaking instructional design that endeavored to not only provide students alternative opportunities for oral practice after class but also affect their perception of English speaking confidence. In order to encourage the students to engage with a continual learning immersion on English speaking practice, the use of audioblog was taken as facilitation to aid out-of-class learning. To this end, the study aimed to discover two folded perspectives: (1) whether the EFL students’ English speaking confidence would vary before and after the facilitation engaged in the instruction; (2) if so, whether and how the number of recording uploads on audioblogs influence their English speaking confidence accordingly. The participants were 574 senior night school students attending the required English speaking class for one semester. They were tutored to accomplish one theme-related oral recording and post it on their audioblogs after each in-class instruction . Pre/ post- surveys were given to the students to collect responses of their English speaking confidence, as well as the amount of oral recording uploads were gathered for data analysis. The findings of this study showed that a significant difference of improvement on the students’ English speaking confidence by the assistance of oral recording practice. Additionally, regarding different number of oral recording uploads, it displayed that those who accomplished at least four oral recording uploads had a significant difference on English speaking confidence while comparing to those who did none. Although the outperformance on students’ English speaking confidence was appeared only if they uploaded a minimum of four oral recordings, an ascent of English speaking confidence was illustrated via those who did more oral recording uploads on their audioblogs. In sum, the findings of this study highlighted that in terms of ‘more practice’ on EFL speaking, the instructor should be cautious about adapting the English speaking instructional design as well as a systematic extent of speaking practice.

Exergames enable players to interact with games through body movement. With various positive effects of exergaming such as physical, psychosocial and cognitive benefits, exergames are regarded as a desirable tool for promoting physical education. However, there is little research about exergaming experience with flow state, enjoyment, and physical fitness. In this study, The Exergames Flow State Questionnaire (EFSQ) and the Physical Fitness Self-assessment Questionnaire (PFSAQ) were designed and developed with good reliability (α=0.97; α=0.92). The results of correlation analysis show that more frequent play of exergames and longer use of the exergame consoles may increase the incidence of flow state and enjoyment. Additionally, the frequency of playing exergames is significantly correlated to PFSAQ, indicating that more often the users play the exergames, the more sense of health physical fitness they will have. The findings of this investigation could be used in physical education planning. Meanwhile, EFSQ and PFSAQ can be used as alternative tools to measure flow state and physical fitness.

Incidental vocabulary learning is regarded as one of the main sources of learner-centered vocabulary acquisition in authentic situations. In the past decades, extensive reading has been the main focus in incidental learning research. Recent studies have examined how information technology media can assist learners in acquiring vocabulary incidentally. More specifically, the affordances of MORPGs, such as vivid 3D simulation scenarios and players' interactions and communications, may be applied to construct an incidental language learning environment. This study is based on Krashen’s Input Hypothesis to implement task-based learning in an MORPG that was suited for learners' background. An experiment was conducted for 26 sixth-grade students. Twelve target words were selected from the content text of the game to assess learners’ vocabulary learning. The results from this study demonstrate that learners, especially the low academic achievers and less game experienced students, acquired the target vocabulary incidentally after being exposed to the MORPG language learning environment.

This study explores affective states resulting from the removal or absence of captioning support in movies for the instruction of English as a foreign language listening comprehension. It aims to provide evidence of different affective states, which arise from the removal of this support, according to levels of proficiency. Prior knowledge of these states may enable EFL instructors and course designers to weigh the costs of exposing learners to this support and prepare learners for possible negative effects, avoiding any negative emotions, which may affect learning.

A consideration to gradually boost students’ willingness to communicate in the target language (L2) within the EFL instruction is seen to be an important preliminary to encourage EFL students to be able to have more English oral practice and product. While EFL students are in sharing and discussion in pairs or in groups, the intervention of the mother tongue (L1) use, as well as their background information in terms of confidence in English use and challenge in English use, might affect students’ perceptions for English oral practice. In order to provide an efficient English speaking setting, a means of integrating synchronous computer-mediated communication in the instructional setting is employed to facilitate pairs and groups sharing. To this end, the aim of the study is to examine the relations of students’ perceptions on oral practice within their background and the intervention of L1 use in the integrated EFL learning setting. 195 senior high school students were recruited after engaging in the semester-long English speaking class. Based on a prior study qualitatively conducting students’ feedback in this learning process, a questionnaire, Perception for Synchronous Oral Computer-mediated Communication Questionnaire (PSOCMC) is developed. The findings demonstrate six factors revealed in terms of interactiveness, autonomy in English use, clarity of audio processing, intermediary of technology, instant support, and efficiency are analyzed and adopted for investigation. It shows the L1 use in students’ sharing would affect them being autonomous in English use, and an indispensable role of confidence in English use in the EFL in-class environment.

In general, video-based learning contains rich media information, but displaying an entire video linearly is time-consuming. As an alternative, video summarization techniques extract important content provides short but informative fragments. In this paper, a video learning platform (KVSUM: Keyword-based Video Summarization) is presented that integrates image processing, text summarization, and keyword extraction techniques. Without human annotators, the learning platform can process an input video and transform it into online learning materials automatically. The video frames are first split from a given video while the transcription is used to generate the text summary and keywords. In the current study, the video surrogates are composed of extracted keywords, text and video summaries, and video frames. In other words, KVSUM is able to provide both visual and verbal surrogates. In order to validate the effect of surrogates in the KVSUM, a comparison with another video surrogate, the fast forward (FF), to evaluate learners' comprehension to video contents. Sixty undergraduate students took part in examining two different video surrogates. The experimental results show that KVSUM had a more positive effect than FF in comprehension to videos. In terms of system usage and satisfaction, KVSUM is significantly more attractive than FF to learners.

Video-based concordancer can be used to provide a scenario that engage context information of studying novel words. Usually, a fixed number of contextual sentences are retrieved accompanying the keywords. However, there may be a lack of complete context for learners to comprehend the keywords in the videos. Few studies have discussed about how the videos are presented to assist learners to use the keywords appropriately, and lead learners to find relevant knowledge effectively. In this paper, a keyword-in-scene video concordance (KWIS), which recognizes the scenes in the videos and provides the scene-based clips, is proposed. Each video clip is tagged actual scene type information. Learners are able to query the KWIS system with keywords, phrases, or natural language sentences, and watch relevant scenario clips to understand where the conversation can be carried on. A pilot study was conducted to evaluate the proposed system. The result shows that there is a positive effect on students' comprehension of English phrases while using the system.

The notion of informal learning becomes more generally receivable nowadays for different learning choices. By a variety of preferences, a learner is potentially encouraged and motivated to engage in alternate style or means of learning to meet own interest. Also, a facilitation of online resources provides accessibility and convenience for the learner to not only have a broad content search opportunity but also assemble an abounding learning environment. Thus, the study addresses these issues explicitly to a condition of Chinese as foreign language learning by examining the procedure of an individual case who is immersing in a thorough online environment to acquire the Chinese language knowledge. The finding discusses how the online learning environment enables the individual learner to gain the Chinese language effectively. The result indicates that the informal learning style brings a gradual and rippling spread of Chinese language awareness to the learner, moreover, a structured and reciprocal online learning environment is built up according to the adaption of the learning custom and willingness.

While acquiring English as a foreign language, a consideration on providing a genuine English learning environment to learners can arouse a more active and direct immersion of the language learning. By the feature of authenticity, English listening comprehension has been seen as an important prerequisite to other language skills in English learning. Moreover, a different receiving listening process of bottom-up or top-down way might influence how learners comprehend the information. Besides, an appearance of pod cast is identified as a beneficial facilitation to foreign language learning, and through its usage might enrich the language learning efficiency. To this end, this study addresses these notions to concern how the pod cast can be an aid to advance alternative means of English listening comprehension to EFL learners. The findings discuss how and the distinction of the two different listening comprehended processing within pod cast affect learning outcome, the role of prior knowledge, background information, and pod cast among the learning procedure. The expected results tend to show the alternative listening comprehended processing would benefit EFL learners who engage in different prior knowledge and background of English learning experience. A concern of different English level learners might favor either distinct or alternate means of listening processing.

Listening comprehension plays a vital role at the beginning of foreign language learning (FLL). Several studies demonstrate that listening comprehension is not only essential to the early stage of FLL but also an arrangement for further language competence learning. Also, a supplement of authentic-based ICT facilitation can benefit and enrich the listening competence to encourage a more sufficient FLL. Thus, this paper addresses these issues specifically on a Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) learner to a case study. It is analyzed on listening comprehension to see whether a learning metacognition of CFL learning can be reached or not. The finding discusses that how the potential of listening competence can bridge other language competence learning efficiency on CFL learning. The result appears that a considerably potential of listening competence can foster further Chinese language competence, and has been constructed gradually a learning metacognition.

Listening comprehension is the most important part of English communication. Watching English films helps getting both audio and visual messages which can improve the learners’ listening comprehension. In this study, we examined the full text captions films and the keyword captions with nouns and verbs to help understand the different effects of listening comprehension. One hundred English majored high school students participated in this experiment. This research indicated that with only nouns in the keyword captions the participants’ listening comprehension was greatly assisted and reduced both the audio and visual senses from information overloading. On the other hand, with only verbs in the keyword captions, the participants’ listening comprehension was excessively low. Moreover, the effects of listening comprehension for different types of films which include natural science and cultural history films were discussed. Natural science films provided more information without a necessary of a great deal of background knowledge; therefore it was easier for the participants to understand. However, it was difficult to comprehend cultural history films without having a certain level of knowledge of the background information. From the results, due to the participants’ positive attitude towards the system satisfaction and learning approach, the participants had more self-confidence and higher motivation to operate the system and interface afterwards.

Abstract This article presents a bilingual video question answering (QA) system, namely BVideoQA, which allows users to retrieve Chinese videos through English or Chinese natural language questions. Our method first extracts an optimal one‐to‐one string pattern matching according to the proposed dense and longN‐gram match. On the basis of the matched string patterns, it gives a passage score based on our term‐weighting scheme. The main contributions of this approach to multimedia information retrieval literatures include: (a) development of a truly bilingual video QA system, (b) presentation of a robust bilingual passage retrieval algorithm to handle no‐word‐boundary languages such as Chinese and Japanese, (c) development of a large‐scale bilingual video QA corpus for system evaluation, and (d) comparisons of seven top‐performing retrieval methods under the fair conditions. The experimental studies indicate that our method is superior to other existing approaches in terms of precision and main rank reciprocal rates. When ported to English, encouraging empirical results also are obtained. Our method is very important to Asian‐like languages since the development of a word tokenizer is optional.

In this paper, we propose the English dialogue companion (EDC) system to help elementary school students learn second language, as English. Learners can practice conversation with the EDC system in English. In order to motivate the learners, we design the three learning activities to enhance the environment of English learning, which are the choice of learning companion phase, the conversation phase, and the teaching phase. We also conducted a pilot study to evaluate the EDC system. The results showed the subjects agreed that the system is positive and useful. For the most of learners, we found that the most favorite learning activity is to teach learning companion. In addition, the greater part of learners liked the same gender learning companion. And learners selected the learning companion depended on the learning companion is regards as a classmate or a teacher.

In this paper, we present a robust passage retrieval algorithm to extend the conventional text question answering (Q/A) to videos. Users interact with our videoQ/A system through natural language queries, while the top-ranked passage fragments with associated video clips are returned as answers. We compare our method with five of the high-performance ranking algorithms that are portable to different languages and domains. The experiments were evaluated with 75.3 h of Chinese videos and 253 questions. The experimental results showed that our method outperformed the second best retrieval model (language models) in relatively 1.43% in mean reciprocal rank (MRR) score and 11.36% when employing a Chinese word segmentation tool. By adopting the initial retrieval results from the retrieval models, our method yields an improvement of at least 5.94% improvement in MRR score. This makes it very attractive for the Asia-like languages since the use of a well-developed word tokenizer is unnecessary.

In this paper, the authors proposed a mobile video QA (Question Answering) system for online annotation and ubiquitous multimedia learning. Under the wireless and mobile environment, learners could interact with the system through natural language questions rather than traditional query-like text retrieval. The handheld device is not as well as traditional keyboard input, while the annotation is quite inefficient and inconvenient. To solve this, the authors designed a simple browsing and clicking model to enable learners annotating and auto-feedback as e-mail to learner's mail box. A pilot study was conducted to evaluate the preliminary experimental results for learning. The experimental results showed that the proposed system effectively engaged learners in multimedia video QA in handheld device where all subjects agreed that the system is positive and useful.

In this paper, the authors present a video content summarization for recommendation (called VCSR) system to auto-recommend suitable multimedia learning materials for learners. The VCSR system firstly extracts important content as summarization from input raw video data, while the generated summarization will be auto-routed to learners according to their profiles. Video captions are initially recognized using optical character recognition (OCR), then a set of key passages with corresponding frame images are extracted to form a video summary. The recommendation is achieved by calculating the relevance of the video summarization for each learner. Also, this paper indicates how the VCSR system effectively plays the intermediate role in a modern digital library.

This study aims to design an inquiry learning activity using wireless and mobile technologies for applying to science experiment course in elementary school. The authors provide clues to guide an inquiry learning activity. The inquiry activity comprises six steps, which are providing clues, getting clues, investigating and collecting data, comparing data, integrating clues, and verifying answer. The inquiry activity includes individual and group inquiry. Students use clues to find out plants having the same clue, and use embedded digital camera to take photos on the characteristic of plants based on the clue. When students came back to the classroom, they can discuss with group members using the data they collected outdoor. Based on the design, a mobile inquiry-based learning system was implemented for science experiment course. The system modules include Web services and inquiry function modules. The Web services function module consists of communication, record, and management functions. The inquiry function module consists of template download, data upload, and inquiry plant functions. Finally, a preliminary study was conducted to observe students' learning status

Human activities are always driven by events. Event-driven learning refers to learning taking place during the preparation process of the event, not necessarily during the participation process of the event. In the study, the authors extend the previous research "EduClick" and design the learning model of the event-driven learning. They process a competition using EduClick to drive the students' learning interests. Students can do goal setting, learn actively by themselves during the preparing period, and then accumulate enough strength to participate the competition event. They hold an across-classroom competition event, and hope students' learning motivation can be driven by the event.

How to apply the online social learning communities into physical social learning communities is an important research issue. This work describes the design and implementation of multilayer educational services platforms for learners to construct their own online social learning communities and to integrate their online environments into a large public learning portal site-EduCities. In order to integrate different kinds of learning environments, multilayer framework were designed. An architecture called EduX is proposed and implemented to integrate with K-12 learning communities. One year after the EduX system was released on the Internet, 1802 schools, 13023 classes, and 96222 individuals in Taiwan had registered to use the system to construct their own online learning communities. Evaluation results indicate that the system is satisfied with teachers and students in building K-12 learning communities.

The purpose of this study is to develop a passport system based on ARCS model for Internet users to learn basic information technology skills. The system is designed to increase learners' motivation and use it actively. Due to an assistant teaming mechanism, it can improve learners' information literacy. The teaming contents are about information technologies. The styles of the test include multi-choices and practical manipulation tasks. The system automatically evaluates the results, records the process and outcome of the test. The system adopts a role-play strategy, so that users can proceed to the test in the form of games. When a user encounters problems in the test, he/she can find relevant information to assist his/her teaming. The main users of the system are teachers and students of junior high schools and elementary schools at Taoyuan County in Taiwan. From December 1999 to June 2001, 1273783 users have already used the system.

This paper describes a system, called reading contract system, based on the concept of mission-based learning. The system is developed in order to foster children's reading habits and active learning attitudes under the design of mission-based learning. Activities in a reading contract are designed to include the steps of dealing with a contract. During the process, children must take risks to fail and try to develop responsibility for accomplishing the task in limited time. The spirit conforms to the most critical characteristic of mission-based learning. The reading contract system is built on a reading website. In this learning environment, some aids and tools are provided to help children setting and achieving their learning goals on reading. The role of parents and teachers is to assist children facing their tasks and collaborate with them in the learning communities.