Adeniyi Ajayi

What Type of Project is it?

This is a project with a nature of game and instructional design and development.

What’s the Objective?

For this class, I plan to design and implement a game. My most recent quarter preceding this one was my first time actually producing games in Unity, but I desire to work with it and make games more, so I will be taking the project of this class as an opportunity to do so. Over the course of the project, I expect to develop my game design and scripting skills further.

I have an interest in creating games for self-enrichment, including learning skills players can take away and use in real-life settings. For this project, I have chosen to focus on facilitating growth in skill with tonic sol-fa, a pedagogical tool used by educators for musicians to read notes, i.e., recognize pitches in relation to the particular musical key in use. Tonic sol-fs goes like so: do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, and do (cycling back to the beginning).

There will be a sort of testing format assessing player recognition of the tonal positions with varying difficulties. Players will have to correctly determine what tonal placements are being played and in what order. Difficulty will be determined by factors such as the number of notes being played at a time for the player to identify, the number of tones in the pool to guess from at a time, and the frequency of key changes. For example, for someone who wants to work on recognizing thirds (every other note), the difficulty progression could look like this:

2 notes from (do, mi) in the key of C ->

3 notes from (do, mi) in the key of C ->

3 notes from (do, mi, so) in the key of C ->

4 notes from (do, mi, so) in the key of C ->

4 notes from (do, mi, so) in keys of (C/A) …

This particular example mimics the way I experienced it in the group training led by my assistant choir director, which inspired the creation of a game for further practice.

Whenever, there is a key change, the player will get to hear the new tonic (do) for reference. Players will not be given multiple-choice selections but have to interact with representations of the tonic sol-fa tonal placements in a meaningful way to justify the learning medium being a game.

What makes this Novel?

It’s novel to me at the very least. I have little actual experience building games, and this type of game that focuses on learning to build cognitive skills does not have any of its members coming to mind as examples. I can think of Duolingo as something similar in the way it approaches learning languages, but it is not actually a game. It is a gamified learning method. Games of the like that work on musical development are just not something I have knowledge of, so it was exciting to think about implementing this concept.

What makes this Interdisciplinary?

This project involves interactive media design, musical education, and instructional design. To have a meaningful end product in the resulting game, the pedagogy and instructional methodology have to properly utilize the concept being taught, and the game design has to effectively represent the concept. If the game doesn’t adequately mirror the concept as it appears in real life, learning outcomes will not be the best they could be.

What are the Learning Foci?

Unity, Instructional Design, Game Design, Level Design, UI Design, UX Design

What is the Approximate Timeline?

Weeks 4–5: Proof of Concept: Have basic functionality in Unity.

Weeks 6–7: Determining difficulty progression with review of experts and comparing with what can be implemented

Weeks 7–8: Expert input is incorporated into the level design.

Weeks 9–10: Implementing levels