PROBLEM STATEMENT

Music ignites all areas of child development: intellectual, social and emotional, motor, language, and overall literacy. Music and movement teach children early math skills and aid in literacy. Also, children can also explore emotions, which may help them better understand who they are.
However, children’s short attention span is a big issue for learning music. Children ages 5-6 years old typically can attend to one activity that is of interest to them for around 10-15 minutes at a time and should generally be able to filter out small distractions occurring simultaneously in the environment.

I. USER Research

Personas

There are primary user and secondary user in our system. Children are our target audience who we first and foremost designed for; parents and teachers are our secondary users who are occasional users or use the system through an intermediary.

Physical Limitations

With children's eyes focused on a page filled with mysterious dots and lines, they’re being asked to curve their fingers, relax their wrist. Those are not easy for adults, even for the kids.
Another thing is children have a hard time to pull over their finger. The distances between notes might be larger than their hands. Or they are not tall enough to reach the pedals. Very young children should play three-note chords or music with many independent voices split between the hands.

Cognitive Limitations

General cognitive skills are necessary for learning and include attention, memory, logic and reasoning.

Attention: On average, a 4- or 5-year-old child should be able to stay focused on a task for 2-5 minutes times the year of their age. Young kids should be able to focus between 4 and 20 minutes, possibly more, depending on the task.
Sensory Memory: Children will look at the keyboard(white and black, layout, shape), touch it (material, woodwind texture, weight, hard and gentle) and hear the sounds(low sounds and high sounds, loud and quiet, harmony and discord).
Short-term/Working Memory: Children have to memorize the sound of every note and the pattern. When they touch one note, they remember the sound and position by keep trying. In addition, they need to memorize a short piece of melody.
Long-term Memory: Children need to memorize the position of the notes and the melody. The hand goes on playing without your really remembering each note, including the gesture of both hands, the distances between notes, the timing of the music, like when suppose to be stopped, loud and quite, strong of soft, when should step on the pedal, how long should it last.

Task Analysis

Main Objectives:

Get children excited to play music
Learn how to play piano
Develop skills
Make playing piano a long-term hobby

Mastering a musical instrument takes time, dedication, discipline and concentration. For a child to actually become interested in playing an instrument they need to be engaged, they need to be motivated, and they need to have fun!

II. Idea Generation

Based on our deep understanding of users, we designed a music gaming system will be a good approach to learning music for kids.

Attention is related to emotion and their intensity of those emotions. How much attention a child gives a task also depends on whether he/she is enjoying himself/herself. Because video games, apps, and other technologies engage the sustained attention and focus of these children, they can be powerful tools for learning. Children love immersion, they love to really get their heads into things and stay with them for a long time – stories, games, relationships.

The game background is based on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which is a beautiful interactive and magical production of one of the most famous fairy tales by the Grim Bothers. We consider it as an effective material to retrieve memories and connect with kids. We adapt the story slightly to align with our main purpose: encourage children learning piano.

a. Space

b. Goal

The evil stepmother tries to kill the prince by poisoned apples. The goal is to save the prince from the wicked queen.

c. Rules

Snow White has to turn the poisoned apple(green) into safe, healthy apple(red) by pushing down on the right key. Seven Dwarfs will help Snow White when she faces challenges(songs). Seven Dwarfs represent 7 basic notes (the major scale are C D E F G A B C).

d. Components

e. Mechanism

The goal of mechanism design aims to help children memorize the relationship between piano notes and keyboard. During songs, Seven Dwarfs will consume their energy. Therefore, the player has to restore Seven Dwarfs’ energy through some challenges.

III. user testing

he first version prototype is drew on the paper so that the children could see it clearly. Our target audience is 6-12 year old girls. They’re vivacious, full of imagination, curious to learn. We decided to go to Exposition Park to interview our users.

During this interview, we received 100% positive feedback on our product. They liked the story line and it’s easy to understand the system. Besides, We learned that children have a hard time knowing which keyboard should play. They could not get instant feedback; that is, they do not know if they’re right or wrong. In addition, they feel difficult to memorize the notes. Also, girls especially are obsessed with Frozen. Therefore, we’re going to consider these feedbacks that are helpful for our next prototype.