TogsTalks

Part 14 – A Well Deserved Break

Hello and welcome back everybody, I hope you’ve all had a wonderful time over the last while and that you’ve enjoyed a few of these blogs that I’ve produced for you all! I’ve had a really enjoyable time this semester and I’m SUPER glad you’ve decided to be here for it. This is a special ‘TogsTalks’ episode where I’ll be reflecting on some of the things I’ve learnt and sharing some thoughts about the presentation evening, where I’m at with my video game, as well as discussing with you where I am with utilising technology in my own music teaching.

THE CLASSES

Over the semester we’ve had the opportunity to practice tons of different musical composition variations, from SoundTrap, GarageBand, Reaper, Sonic Pi, Ableton to various standard compositional softwares such as Sibelius, Musescore and Noteflight. Further, I’ve had the opportunity to learn new programs such as Premier Pro, Musition and Auralia and my own assignment where I learn to code in Unity with C#. All these various ways of using music in a classroom was extremely enlightening and taught me so much about heaps of different parts of music and the way it operates.

I similarly loved the opportunities I had to meet and learn from such talented people like Phil in the maker space week, Rowena in the coding week and Ethan Hein in the final week of semester, not to mention the person that’s carried me all the way through, James Humberstone. These people have taught me so much this semester and made this time trapped in my study at home in lockdown SO MUCH MORE engaging and interesting. I’ve had a really enjoyable time with my experimentation of these programs and I’m ready to spend the next three months seeing what I can do with them all.

PRESENTATION EVENING

Next I’d like to spend a minute talking about the presentation evening. This was epic. So many of my peers have produced such creative and exciting projects and I would highly encourage you to explore this page in James Humberstone’s blog. This page has blogs of my peers and shares the projects they’ve all individually created. It was a pleasure to be able to watch all of these people share their projects with the world and inspire me to take my teaching in so many ways.

In regards to my own project however, I am extremely happy with how my presentation went. I feel like I was able to show off how this game worked and the process I’ve taken to get to the stage that I’m at. It also helped to point me in the direction that I’d like to take this game. Theres so many ways I can develop it and expand it and simultaneously improve my own skills.

1. I’d like to create a small village for the player to start in. I think it would be a fun little game if the player was able to walk through from a town, into a forest and be confronted with the epic castle
2. I would like to learn how to program NPC’s (non-playable characters) who can help guide the player on their way. This would also allow me to have an actual ‘Music Mage’ to fight once they reached the end of the game
3. One person on the evening inspired the idea that perhaps I should try incorporate timed levels, have some stages where they have to identify something in a certain time or they lose a life, to help add a competitive aspect between students
4. I’d also like to learn how to create ‘assets’ which are like the walls of the castle, or the trees etc. These seem super complex to make but I feel that for the game to run more smoothly, it would need better parts and I think I’d be quite proud to present a house which I designed and constructed entirely myself

FINAL WORDS

James asked a great question after my presentation. And I’ve been thinking about it for the last two days:

“How can these skills I’ve developed be used in the classroom?”

And I’ve been stumped. I cannot entirely understand why I feel that coding a game is a useful ‘skill to have for the classroom,’ but I don’t believe it’s a useless one. This is because I think it has the chance to be useful. This kind of knowledge helps to teach students if you’d like to engage in a Project Based learning task with the IT faculty, or provide cross curricular links with another subject. Further, by creating games now, and knowing how to do it, I can easily produce content to pass onto students in the future. This game that I’m creating is aimed towards the students that struggle to focus, or don’t quite understand music. The ones that with a little bit of extra help or guidance could become inspired! One of the things semester has taught me is that people learn in their own way. Some of my peers struggled with Ableton or Sonic Pi while I excelled, however I couldn’t get motivated behind some more of the theory based classes where my peers couldn’t be more engaged. In a classroom, I don’t believe these skills are always the most applicable, but being a Jack of All Trades for your students is important, because they can all be so different.

I’ll be posting an update later as to how to access the game once I’ve finished it. I hope you’ve enjoyed this journey and I hope to be back soon to keep TogsTech alive!