One of the important and challenging objectives of social studies courses is to promote students' affective domain exhibition, including learning interest, positive attitudes and local culture identity. In this paper, a location‐aware mobile learning approach was proposed based on a competition strategy for conducting local cultural activities in the field. During the field trip, the learners were asked to learn in the mobile learning environment by throwing a dice to determine their moves using a tablet computer. Each move was related to a problem‐based learning task associated with the corresponding real‐world target at the specified location. To assess the effects of the peer competition‐based mobile learning approach on students' affective domain exhibition, a quasi‐experimental design was employed to conduct a learning activity in the social studies course of an elementary school. From the experimental results, it was found that the proposed approach significantly improved the students' local culture identity, learning interest, and learning attitudes; moreover, it also decreased their cognitive load when guiding them to learn in the field trip.