Upon reflection, I believe that gamifying learning is a wonderful idea and pedagogical practice. Though as teachers, we hope that our learners are finding intrinsic motivation to learn within our subject areas, we also all know that everyone is different, including their learning styles and interests. Some learners love math but detest PHE. Others love visual art but can’t stand biology. Because of this, teachers need to have a large bag of learning tools that extrinsically motivate our learners. Learning games, whether technologically based or not, are incredibly effective ways to do this. Personally, I really believe that learning can and should be fun, whenever possible. I know for myself that when learning is fun, I imprint information at a much deeper level in my brain.
I’ve had the opportunity to try using some game-based learning with my private piano students. SimplyPiano has gamified elemens, where students have to play along with a piano role. In doing so, they must play the correct notes and the correct rhythms for the game to record it as accurate. The more mistakes, the lower the score and star-level achieved. Adding to these elements of reward-based learning, a progression of difficulty is also included. When learners achieve enough “3-stars” performances at a certain difficulty level, they ‘unlock’ new songs, at higher difficulty levels.
There are also drawbacks to SimplyPiano. Often, the correct rhythm doesn’t register properly, and even though the player is correct, it’s recorded as errors. Also, if one simply wants to get perfect scores and has no real interest in playing the songs well, they can just mash down every note at once for every rhythm, and SimplyPiano will only ‘hear’ the correct note among all the wrong ones. It doesn’t teach proper finger movement, or include rudiments or exercises which develop proper technique, either. SimplyPiano and other tools like it should be considered as just one small approach that can enhance an overall teaching/learning strategy.
Non-sponsored review of Simply Piano: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOVdBXQouFY
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