Project Flappy Crab : an edugame for music learning

This chapter discusses some possibilities of gamification and remixing processes for music education. It also analyzes the concepts of gamification, mashup/remix and presents its possible usage in education—music teaching—through the development of the project/educational game FLAPPY CRAB. The chapter begins with a brief introduction to the concepts listed above, trying to consider them in the school context. After that, we will make the summary presentation of the music educational game FLAPPY CRAB, a clone of the GEARS Studios Flappy Bird, developed for mobile devices and other platforms with the UNITY 3D© game engine. In this chapter we’ll talk yet, albeit briefly, about the game engine used in the development of this educational application. This educational game aims to assess the possible impacts that its use has on learning and skill development related to auditory memory, qualitative discrimination of musical sound height (pitch—in the range of an octave with a central point in 440 Hz), visual identification of musical notation symbols and its relative organization according to the grammar rules of traditional music spelling. The game has been tested by a group of approximately 30 teenagers over a period of about 6 months, over which data was collected. In this chapter, we will present a review of the preliminary data collected to date.

Intercultural musical learning in the era of technology

Foreign students abroad need to feel integrated in the new community, which includes complex learning processes in multicultural environments. The fact that we have experienced these processes ourselves was certainly a motivation for this research, especially knowing that we could contribute to help our fellow Portuguese brass players undergoing the same experience. From the singularity of music performance in the style of playing and communication emerge many cultural aspects, which have been developed through centuries of orchestral practice. As the new students are confronted with the aesthetic musical concepts and both professional and social practices of the country they arrive in, they strive to understand these concepts and adapt themselves to the values promoted by the new music practice. The aim of this on-going research is the study of the integration of brass music students in German universities and in the German society. Notably, through the understanding of intercultural processes experienced by the students, professors can become more aware of the challenges that concern music education. In this research all ten Portuguese brass students enrolled in any German music university in the last five years were interviewed in order to deeply understand this process. With a growing importance of the technological facilities, students are able to gather more information, to prepare themselves for the new concepts they try to embrace and to better deal with a different culture.

A bot spooler architecture to integrate virtual worlds with e-learning management systems for corporate training

Joining efforts of academic and corporate teams, we developed an integration architecture - MULTIS - that enables corporate e-learning managers to use a Learning Management System (LMS) for management of educational activities in virtual worlds. This architecture was then implemented for the Formare LMS. In this paper we present this architecture and concretizations of its implementation for the Second Life Grid/OpenSimulator virtual world platforms. Current systems are focused on activities managed by individual trainers, rather than groups of trainers and large numbers of trainees: they focus on providing the LMS with information about educational activities taking place in a virtual world and/or being able to access within the virtual world some of the information stored in the LMS, and disregard the streamlining of activity setup and data collection in multi-trainer contexts, among other administrative issues. This architecture aims to overcome the limitations of existing systems for organizational management of corporate e-learning activities.