This project was completed for an internship at Musicians Institute in the fall of 2015. The guidelines for the project were to create a game with interactive activities to help students at Musicians Institute practice music theory concepts.
Work Process
During my internship at Musicians Institute, one of the program chairs wanted to find a creative way to give students more practice with music theory concepts to improve their performance in those courses. After meeting to brainstorm, we determined that a game-based approach would be the best way to address this. The challenge, then, was to create a game that included meaningful practice activities, presented them in a logical order, and provided appropriate scaffolding and feedback to support learners as they progress through the activities.
Analysis
My first step was to develop a profile of the target learners for this course that considered their demographics, prior knowledge and experiences, skill level, and motivation. Next, I reviewed some of the current video curriculum being used for these courses to analyze the learning objectives, content, and unit organization.
Design
After completing my analysis, I determined that the videos in each unit should be grouped into modules by topic. A game could then be included for each module in the unit as a way to practice the concepts learned in that module. Based on the learner profile developed during the analysis phase, I identified some key considerations for the game design. It should have a relatively quick gameplay time. The practice activities should move from more to less scaffolding as learners progress through the game. The gamification features should support, rather than distract from, the learning objectives of the practice activities.
To develop the game prototype, I narrowed my focus down to one module. I then consulted the video curriculum for that module, as well as my SME, the program chair, to determine which concepts were most important for students to practice for that module. I created storyboard examples with ideas for interactive practice activities and presented these to the program chair for approval.
Development
After getting the practice activities approved by the program chair, I started working on the design and layout of the game. The overall concept I came up with for the game was that each activity would be a “gig” at a different venue in Hollywood, represented by a star on the game map. Students would earn money as they successfully completed each “gig” (practice activity). Next, I worked on planning the branching scenarios and interactions needed to achieve this concept design, followed by storyboarding the layout, graphics, text, multimedia, and triggers for each slide. Finally, I built out the game prototype in Captivate and tested it to make sure the branching and interactions functioned correctly.
