Gamifying Music Education: An Appealing and Engaging Method of Practice for Teenagers

Abstract

Music interventions have been proven to have positive effects on educational processes and development of children. But music education has been in jeopardy for the past 3 years due to the Covid-19 pandemic and overall has been inaccessible due to exorbitant costs, social stigma, and lack of engagement. Under these conditions, this paper seeks to answer the question of whether gamification makes music practice more effective and appealing. To accomplish this, a mobile game is designed to utilize a fantasy narrative with interactions triggered by the sound from an instrument This game, named Octavion, features a captured princess who escapes with movement dictated by notes played on a musical instrument. Music notes appear on screen at certain times, which emulates sight reading sheet music. Qualitative and quantitative user experiments are conducted to understand the impact of the game on users’ instrument playing aptitude and engagement. The results from playtests show that playing the game does improve the testers’ sight-reading speed. In a larger context, this experiment indicates that a game of this structure can be appealing and effective to help teenagers read and play music.