Designing a Game for Learning Math by Composing: A Finnish Primary School Case

Abstract

Music is filled with mathematical relations. When creating music, the composer must keep in mind the rhythm, the notes, and how well they ring with each other. Our aim was to design an application that teaches these relationships and allows users to compose their own songs using numbers. Our work follows the design science research method, and we have co-designed the application together with elementary school students and teachers in Finland. This paper demonstrates the design process and provides an analysis on our design based on data collected from the participants in two separate sessions.

A Lightweight Co-Construction Activity for Teaching 21st Century Skills at Primary Schools

“…The activity was held in the form of a weekly club on 8 occasions for two different groups of children. Within our research setting, our goal was to co-design further an application called Harmony Hippo, which focused on composing music with mathematics, and was developed and preliminarily tested at Pääskyvuori school in winter 2016-2017 [37] . Our overall goal of creating a sustainable lightweight activity meant, we were unable to adopt, for example, a Cooperative Inquiry type of approach which is usually held with 3-4 adults per 6-8 students [19].…”

“…Our overall goal of creating a sustainable lightweight activity meant, we were unable to adopt, for example, a Cooperative Inquiry type of approach which is usually held with 3-4 adults per 6-8 students [19]. As no other approach presented in the background section of this paper was suitable for our needs, we decided to shape our own activity drawing inspiration from Cooperative Inquiry [10], Hevner Design Science [26], our previous work at Pääskyvuori school [37] and gamified co-design in primary schools [9]. Study 1 activity was organised the following way: the students were split into two groups of 10 and 11 students respectively.…”

“…The comment being that interaction and game play dynamics are not adequately expressed in lo-fi artefacts and that, therefore, the designs could not be utilised directly but required extensive reinterpretation by the developers. In our own previous attempts at codesigning a maths and music game with primary children [37] , we also encountered the challenge of explaining complex design issues to children with paper in-order to move forward. Our conclusions can be found in the first case study below.…”

Affordances of music composing software for learning mathematics at primary schools

“…Technology has now evolved to a point (Holmes and Holmes 2002;Taylor 2014) where it allows composing to be integrated into music education in previously unattainable ways (Gall and Breeze 2015;Pitts and Kwami 2002). New technologies and ideas for music composing emerge constantly, a few recent examples being multiplayer music making (Wejam 2018), a distributed programmable computer music system (Shapiro et al 2017) and a mathematical composing tools with gamified elements (Laato et al 2017;Lim, Lee, and Ke 2017). Even early studies where students composed music using MIDI technology show promising results (Airy and Parr 2001).…”

“…The methodology for finding existing composing software could be improved upon to include applications on mobile platforms. For example, a promising mobile game with unique note input methods and visualisations, Yatatoy's Bandimal (Yatatoy 2019) and a mathematical composing software Harmony Hippo (Laato et al 2017) were excluded due to the platform limitations. In addition, the indicators based on which the eight visualisations and five note input methods were determined could be tweaked or changed.…”