Pedagogical Foundation to Promote Students’ Engagement and Creativity While Co-creating a Music Learning Game

Abstract

Learning-game co-creation is a pedagogical activity where learners draw on their knowledge of a specific topic to collaboratively create a learning game that peers can later use to gain a new understanding of a topic (Kafai & Burke, 2015; Kangas, 2010). Indeed, this approach offers important learning opportunities, as students call upon their acquired knowledge to create the different components of their game (e.g., rules, objective, dynamics, elements), all while also calling upon their creativity and encouraging their engagement with the activity. Studies exploring game creation as a learning activity have allowed us to identify and understand the common phases of this process. However, it is less clear to determine which are pedagogical principles the teacher should consider when implementing this approach into their own “teaching reality.” In this paper, we present a pedagogical experience based on co-creating a music learning game with seven young musicians (age: 10–14). More specifically, our paper presents the educational, operational, and conceptual models that enabled us to establish a robust pedagogical foundation upon which we built this learning activity that, to our knowledge, had never been explored in our field (music education). Therefore, we will explain how we used each model to a) structure the set of activities that enabled the participants to create their own music learning game, b) guide the researcher’s pedagogy act to co-create a music learning game with the students, and c) understand the participants’ creative response towards this learning activity.