APPC: Interactive Teaching Games for the Modern Studio (free Note Rush theme giveaway for conference delegates)

Effectively using technological and hands-on tools to enhance the piano learning experience

I really enjoyed presenting my interactive workshop at the APPC. I was delighted to be given an opportunity to talk about something I am really passionate about - that is gamifying teaching and learning in the piano lessons.

 So how did I get so interested in games in the piano lesson? Well, I first started playing the piano at around about 3 years old. Thinking back to my first few years of piano learning as a preschooler, I was lucky enough to have my grandmother as my first piano teacher, and I remember I just loved practicing everyday. My grandmother had never formally studied the piano or any kind of educational pedagogy, but she clearly knew that play, fun and discovery based learning is how to entice a young child to love playing and learning the piano! Her ways of gamifying learning eventually became a big influence on my own teaching today, as I strive to harness the obsession kids have with games and use it to my advantage as a piano teacher.

I was really excited to be able to share some of these games with my audiences, but because we had very limited time, I could only demonstrate one or two games on how each of the following aspects of piano playing could be gamified:

• Reading Games
• Reading Apps
• Technical training games
• Studio wide challenges
• Theory

Games for beginners:
Reading: A really great resource made by a fellow Kiwi music teacher and author, Rebecca Wilbecks is called Easy Notes. Easy Notes is a fun way of teaching young beginners to instantly recognise the notes without having to count up the lines and spaces. You can purchase a teacher’s pack which includes a magnetic board, and magnets, and the students can purchase a theory book to complete at home. What I love about Easy notes, is the cute little pictures and stories really help children to memorise the notes. Check out Rebecca's fantastic demo video!

And of course, how could I not mention Note Rush! I use Note Rush all the time in my teaching, and I love the fact I can customise the notes I would like my students to practice each week. I also use the app to train for sight singing and relative pitch skills in my students. Here's a video of what I got the whole room of piano teachers to do:

Thanks to the awesome creator of Note Rush, APPC delegates can get a free Studio Licence of the Dinosaurs theme! (requires purchase of Note Rush to redeem). Go to www.noterush.app/appc to redeem! This is for a limited time only.

Game for teaching staccato technique: We have many different kinds of staccatos, we have the big, heavy bounces from the arms, we have the bounce from the wrists, and finally, using more intricate muscles to engage finger staccatos. Finger staccatos have a more articulated sound, but it is generally lighter and and the shortest kind of staccatos. However, we do not want the students to only move from the fingers - we want the arms to be involved in the making of these movements as well. So here we have video, demonstrating what we can do with the erasers with a young beginner.

So as you can see, at the end of the video, the student had a much better finger staccato sound, she also was incorporating the arm a little more to generate the movement for a better flick. She still needed maybe a week of practice, but everyone in the room was absolutely delighted with this game, so I know for sure they are going to go home and practice it every day.

Mini erasers are such invaluable teaching tools. You can find similar products from shops like Kmart, The Warehouse, and Smiggle

Studio wide challenges: I also mentioned a couple of my studio-wide challenges. I have written about these previously on my blog: Student of the Week Polaroid Challenge, and Around The World Scales Race.

 Teaching Italian Terms and Expressions:  I wanted to give everyone at my session a quick taste of how entertaining learning aspects of music theory could be. Traditionally when we teach Italian terms and expressions, we might give students a list of words they have to learn by the next lesson and we test on them on it. However, for such a theatrical and expressive language, there are many better ways of learning it! One of my favourite ways of doing so is to play a game of charades with students. For example here we have a list of Italian terms. I got two volunteers to come up act out one of these words to give clues, and the audience had to yell out the correct answer as fast as possible. Here's our entertaining clip from my talk:

To conclude...

I think I have scratched the surface of what we can do with games in the lessons during my talk. I believe pretty much any element of piano teaching can be gamified to some extend. As the famous nanny Mary Poppins once said: “in every job there must be done, there is an element of fun!”

What I hope I also demonstrated is that when games are used correctly as an educational tool, it has the benefit of giving instant feedback to the student in a fun and non threatening way. It allows us to extend our teaching beyond the studio and yet still have a role in designing and activating learning. And for me an unexpected positive outcome is that it gave me a chance to show our kids how relevant classical music can be in their modern lives, because as teachers we should never cease to think of ways to connect our students to their music every day.