Abstract:

Music theory is essential for one to understand how a music piece is constructed. It is not only theoretical but also practical, providing the fundamentals for playing and composing music. For novices who are learning music, music theory poses a challenge due to the large corpus of potential information to be learned, and its technical nature. Thus, despite the benefits, novice learners can be demotivated and refrain from learning and understanding music theory, which is a challenge for educators. This paper describes an independent research study conducted by a pair of high school students under the mentorship of a senior research scientist from the National Institute of Education, Singapore, from April 2022 till March 2023. The study explored the use of escape room puzzles and instructional scaffolding in teaching novice learners about basic music theory. This study used Shaffer's (2005) epistemic frames in games as the basis for its experiment, combined with the use of technology-based scaffolding. The escape room, “Melody Mystery'', was made and conducted using Scratch, a website for creating games. Puzzles in the form of escape rooms were used due to their role-playing elements, which served to advance the in-game narrative of ‘novice-as-expert’. We examined how effective it was to engage and motivate novice learners when they were made to appropriate the role of an expert in music and solve problems using knowledge and skills from the domain. We found positive responses from participants’ attitudes toward music theory and their ability to retain knowledge of the subject, as well as evidence that suggests games can have significant effects on motivation in the learning process.

Keywords:

Music, escape room, puzzles, music theory, epistemic frames.