How Important is Immersion for Learning in Computer Science Replugged Games?

By following the idea of not using computers at all, Computer Science Unplugged has set the course for many interactive, social, and hands-on activities dealing with concepts and problems of Computer Science Education. Through recent developments in immersive media, technologies like Virtual and Augmented Reality could enhance such activities or even enable new ones. When providing immersive educational media that induce a sense of presence in the virtual environment, the illusion of unmediated learning experience can be delivered. Hence, the concept of "Computer Science Replugged" can benefit from the affordances that Computer Science Unplugged thrives on while facilitating or enabling activities that might be impossible, dangerous, or expensive to carry out in reality:This paper presents three concepts from Computer Science Education that have been modeled as 3-D immersive educational virtual environments: components of a computer, asymmetric encryption/decryption, and finite state machines. To get a first impression of the effectiveness of these approaches and in order to determine the importance of the level of immersion for the learning process, a study with 78 participants was conducted in which the software was tested on different devices. All activities were found to be significantly effective with regards to the pre- and post-tests. When analyzing these results on the basis of comparing the least immersive setting (laptop) with the most immersive setting (head-mounted-display), the findings indicate different effects with effect sizes between beta = -.17 and beta = .41. This raises two questions: "Which topics from Computer Science Education can benefit from immersive technology?" and "What are the opportunities and challenges of the didactical design of Computer Science Replugged activities?" that have to be adressed in further research.