Guest speaker: Rebecca Ly – Games in Music Education
What is Gamification? Whatever it is, sounds fun! And it IS a way of making everyday activities more engaging by adding game ‘elements’ such as reward points, levelling up, badges and goals. For example, earning points for completing homework everyday and if you do this for 7 days in a row, you get rewarded a badge. Gamification encourages and motivates us to achieve activities that we find boring and tiresome.
One of the ways we use gamification in our music classrooms is by playing ‘Kahoot!’ The main screen has questions, which the students pick a choice on their devices and correct answers wins them points. It is a competition to see how has the most points.
Rebecca introduced an example of gamification in music called ‘Rocksmith’ which is like ‘Guitar Heroes’ BUT with an actual guitar! So you get to play games and learn to play the guitar.
Now, as fun as these all sound, we have to take consideration of negative effects. As gamification is an extrinsic motivation it is not a definitive solution to all unexciting activities in our everyday life, and on the long-term, it may even bring negative consequences, such as only enjoying the game aspect and not learning on a deeper level. SO! We need to keep in mind, especially as educators, be critical about the resources we use when teaching and that everything must be done in moderation.
Besides all that, here are some useful Digital Game based learning:
HI MUSED TECH 