Putting the PLAY back into Playing the Piano


Supporting Educators • Promoting Learning
Written by ANDREW EALES


A Radical Manifesto for Piano Education

According to Plato, “life must be lived as play”.
How might this attitude to life benefit piano education?
We teach others to play the piano, but what do we really mean by play?

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The Gamification of Musical Learning


Supporting Educators • Promoting Learning
Written by ANDREW EALES


The rise and rise of electronic video, console and computer games over the last two decades has been spectacular. From Pokémon to Grand Theft Auto, and from Minecraft to Wii Sports, games have become hugely popular and lucrative, and some academics even suggest that they are now the dominant cultural form of the 21st century.

In his much-discussed paper Manifesto for a Ludic Century, Eric Zimmerman suggests that while the twentieth century was the age of information and of moving pictures, the twenty-first is the ludic (game-centric) century.

Zimmerman enthuses,

“Increasingly, the ways that people spend their leisure time and consume art, design, and entertainment will be games, or experiences very much like games.”

We certainly see growing evidence of gamification in music education, and in this article I will be considering and reflecting on the transformative impact this may be having, for better or worse…

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