There’s an App For That?: Are Mobile Music Games Serious Educational Tools

Abstract

Music students face a significant cognitive load, which often causes them to abandon musical studies. Serious games offer a solution to this problem: present educational content in a fun package to increase student engagement and foster self-regulated, independent learning. In this paper we examine serious music games, specifically on the iOS platform. We address three questions: whether these games exhibit the benefits that serious games are considered to have; whether they provide educational value; and whether they offer any improvement over traditional teaching tools. We found that although they can offer the benefit of immediate, automated feedback, the currently available games cover only a small amount of musical knowledge. They also tend to support rote-learning style tasks, resulting in low-level learning outcomes, and do not tailor content to players. Despite these drawbacks the games offer some educational value. However, there is significant scope for continued development in the future.