The relation between students' anxiety and interest in playing an online game

Over the past decades, the education of students has progressively shifted from the traditional teaching environments to technology-assisted settings. In Taiwan, the preference to provide students with multimedia in environments shared by their peers is gaining acceptance and public attention. Therefore, “Chinese Idioms String Up Puzzle game,” a new text reconstruction online program was developed by the Digital Game-Based Learning Laboratory, National Taiwan Normal University in Taiwan to encourage students to use their organizing schemes to learn Chinese Idioms. A survey was conducted to examine participants' anxiety, interest and cognitive load by using this new computer-assisted game. According to the survey, students felt this new program is interesting and would like to play again in the future. For those students who believe anxiety helps their performance, and for those students whose degree of anxiety lowered after completing the test, they tended to have greater interests in playing the game. Findings of the Partial Least Squares (PLS) contribute to an expanded understanding of both psychological anxiety and somatic anxiety influence their cognitive load, whereas both anxieties was not significantly related to their playing interest. In addition, the study results indicated that the higher degree of psychological and somatic anxiety, the greater cognitive load participants had.