The objective of this paper is to test the hypothesis that immersive virtual reality environments such as those achievable through the head-mounted displays, enhance task performance in online engineering design activities. In this paper, task performance is measured by the time to complete a given engineering activity. Over the last decade, a wide range of virtual reality applications have been developed based on non-immersive and immersive virtual reality systems for educational purposes. However, a major limitation of non-immersive virtual reality systems is the lack of an immersive experience that not only provides content to students, but also enables them to interact and learn in a completely 360 degree immersive environment. The authors of this work have developed a replica of a physical engineering laboratory in an interactive virtual learning environment. This research measures the difference in task performance between i) students exposed to an immersive virtual reality system and ii) students exposed to a non-immersive virtual reality system, in the interactive virtual environment developed by the research team. This research seeks to explore whether statistically significant differences in performance exist between these groups. Knowledge gained from testing this hypothesis will inform educators about the value and impact of immersive virtual reality technologies in enhancing online education. A case study involving 54 students in a product functional analysis task is used to test the hypothesis.

The term "Gamification" is an emerging paradigm that aims to employ game mechanics and game thinking to change behavior. Gamification offers several effective ways to motivate users into action such as challenges, levels and rewards. However, an open research problem is discovering the set of gamification features that consistently result in a higher probability of success for a given task, game or application. The objective of this paper is to bridge this knowledge gap by quantifying the gamification features that are consistently found in successful applications. Knowledge gained from this work will inform designers about the gamification features that lead to higher chances of an application's success, and the gamification features that do not significantly impact the success of an application. The case study presented in this work leverages demographic heterogeneity and scale of applications existing within mobile platforms to evaluate the impact of gamification features on the success or failure of those applications. The successful game design features identified have the potential to be embedded into interactive gamification platforms across various fields such as healthcare, education, military and marketing, in order to maintain or enhance user engagement.