With the rapid development of technology, the variety, quality, performance, and social penetration of video games has reached an unprecedented height. The cross‐border combination of education and games has received extensive attention from various areas of society, including education, technology, and so forth. Educational games can create an attractive learning environment for students, make learning more interesting, and enable students to learn by doing, thus improving students' high‐level abilities. Educational games can make learning more scientific, enjoyable, and more effective. Many scholars and institutions have carried out a lot of research and practice about educational games. Based on the educational games research, this review will answer four questions: What are educational games? What is educational games research currently studying? What are the outcomes and benefits of educational games? What are the research directions of future educational games?

The information era puts higher requirements on current students’ learning methods to develop 21st-century skills. Project-based learning (PBL) and gamified learning have been two effective learning approaches, leading to an innovative exploration of combining both to improve learning outcomes. This study presents a systematic review of the literature published on “gamified PBL” (GPBL) over the past six years, focusing on GPBL approaches, learning outcomes, technical tools and theories. The results show that the gamified approaches of project-based learning can be divided into four types: gamify structure and procedure of PBL, gamify content of PBL, integrate prefabricated educational/serious games in PBL, and make a game as the activity of PBL. Most of the studies affirmed the positive effects of GPBL in enhancing students’ learning outcomes, especially for learning experience and motivation. Adopted techniques and theories in the reviewed studies were also summarized. In conclusion, we acquired four findings based on the discussion: the characteristics of GPBL are diverse; design-based learning are an innovative and creative method used in GPBL; studies of GPBL emphasized collection and description of the whole-process data; technical issues should be paid great attention to. In addition, a number of suggestions for future research are provided in this review.

This study investigated the effects of the changes in the image and voice of instructors in online video courses on online learner's learning achievement, social presence, learning satisfaction, and academic emotion. Two simultaneous online experiments were conducted with 122 college students in the image experiment, where the course videos varied in terms of the instructor's image (original image, face-beautified image, virtual image, and no image), and 93 college students in the voice experiment, where the course videos varied in terms of the instructor's voice (original voice, mutated voice, computer-synthesized voice). The results showed that learners viewing videos without instructor images had better learning achievements and less academic boredom relative to those who viewed videos with instructor images. However, the real instructor images were able to promote learners' learning satisfaction of instructor-student interaction more than no image and virtual image and promote satisfaction of instructor teaching more than virtual image. Meanwhile, learners' evaluation of the real instructor images was better than that of the virtual instructor image, and their evaluation of the face-beautified instructor image was better than the original image. Moreover, learners evaluated real instructor voices better than the computer-synthesized voice. In addition, the linear regression analysis revealed that the evaluations of both instructor's image and voice had a positive relationship with learners' social presence, learning satisfaction, and enjoyment, whereas they had a negative relationship with learner's boredom. And the evaluation of the instructor's image positively predicted student's transfer learning achievement. Thus, we suggested that the way of instructor presence should be well-designed and integrated with the course's instructional design and image and voice processing technology can be applied to assist online video course development.

Mounting studies have applied resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) to study major depressive disorder (MDD) and have identified abnormal functional activities. However, how the global functional connectivity patterns change in MDD is still unknown. Using rs-fMRI, we investigated the alterations of global resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) patterns in MDD using weighted global brain connectivity (wGBC) method. First, a whole brain voxel-wise wGBC map was calculated for 23 MDD patients and 34 healthy controls. Two-sample t-tests were applied to compare the wGBC and RSFC maps and the significant level was set at p < 0.05, cluster-level correction with voxel-level p < 0.001. MDD patients showed significantly decreased wGBC in left temporal pole (TP) and increased wGBC in right parahippocampus (PHC). Subsequent RSFC analyses showed decreased functional interaction between TP and right posterior superior temporal cortex and increased functional interaction between PHC and right inferior frontal gyrus in MDD patients. These results revealed the abnormal global FC patterns and its corresponding disrupted functional connectivity in MDD. Our findings present new evidence for the functional interruption in MDD.