Gamification in music education

What is gamification?

Gamification is the use of game design elements and mechanisms to engage users in contexts that are typically less playful. The purpose of gamification is to motivate individuals to perform certain tasks, behave in desired ways, and achieve specific goals. This could be to motivate someone to purchase a particular product, make healthier choices, or even to facilitate learning, either in a corporate training context or in formal education.

Game mechanics include well known video features such as points, rewards, levels, leaderboards, and badges, which can be used to tap into intrinsic motivations to compete, progress, and discover, by creating engaging and rewarding interactive experiences. Fundamentally, gamifying an activity makes for a more fun experience, which is more motivating than if something is boring or dull and repetitive.

How has gamification become so popular?

Why is gamification so popular today? The answer is, quite simply, because everyone loves to play. By nature, human beings like to have fun, to learn, and to share experiences, and games, or gamified experiences, can bring all these things together in a productive way.

Gamification used to have 2 fairly major constraints. When it first came around in the early 2000s, it was expensive, and only really in the hands of powerful, massive companies who could afford to develop and experiment with gamification inhouse and from scratch. It was also limited by the technology of its time when it first came about, so didn’t benefit from being the highly versatile tool widely available broadband and mobile internet speeds have allowed it to develop into. Additionally, the rise of gamification platforms like Drimify means small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) are empowered to easily customise tried-and-tested game engines to their exact needs – be they marketing, human resources-related (HR), or educational.

This approach is often used in marketing campaigns to increase customer engagement to boost sales, and to increase satisfaction rates by improving the user experience (UX) of interacting with a business. It’s also regularly used to boost business productivity and employee engagement in the workplace, be that through more effective training, more efficient recruiting, or more flexible onboarding.

Gamification for education

When making the objectives of gamification educational, the results are incredibly positive. While a lot of students have different learning styles, play is universal – the functionality of games and gameplay to help players retain knowledge and practise skills are unrivalled by other mediums.

Gamification has become a new way of learning and a new effective tool in education to keep up student motivation and engagement. Its added value is to make a student an actor in the course of their learning, and to stimulate their imagination, their memory, and their creativity, as well as being versatile enough to work both in the classroom and at home, as modern gamified experiences work on all modern devices, from smartphones to computers.

Gamified activities for student development in music education

The use of gamification in education can make learning not only more fun, but also more effective, but what about for something complex and highly specialist, like music education?

Perhaps the most obvious example of gamification in music education is the fact that so many students today are learning an instrument, like the piano, using digital apps specifically designed to imitate a gaming experience rather than a traditional lesson. Learners complete built-in activities, earning points, and level up with each piece learned.

The introduction of gamification and game mechanisms to the process of teaching and learning music can allow:

• Students to practise musical instruments both remotely and face-to-face
• To build, memorise, and revise cultural elements and notions of musical vocabulary
• To develop cooperation and collaboration with team games

Music educators can use games and different game mechanics to teach students musical concepts: learning to read musical notation, play instruments, singing songs, and composing music. There are many different types of game that can be created or customised and used in music education.

A customised Quiz, for example, which can easily be made in minutes on the Drimify games creation platform, allows the use of images and videos, but also audio, to help music students develop their ear. For music education, it is an original and sound approach to involve students and test their knowledge in a low pressure way with a Quiz. Consider also the possibilities the Quiz presents in terms of homework, as because modern gamified learning experiences are designed mobile first, they’re easily shared through emails and QR codes to form a part of homework, or remote lessons, when the instructor isn’t there for hands-on teaching.

Integrate the notion of play into your next music class

Gamification is now a frequently utilised educational strategy put in place to increase student motivation in the classroom, and reinvigorate their engagement in their learning journey, and this can also apply to music education. When the training courses, learning, and education in general are made fun, learners are more likely to play, progress and achieve positive results.

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