A Prototype Development of XyloStories

a Serious Game to Support Music Teachers for Kids

Abstract

In music classrooms for three to five years old kids, music teachers use picture book type textbooks and real musical instruments such xylophones or drums. In order to make their classrooms fun for kids, music teachers spend much time to prepare for class contents from scratch every time. If the teacher has many such classes, the amount of time that they spend for preparation becomes enormous, which is a big problem for teachers. In order to solve such problem, we have decided to develop a serious game type textbook used for music classrooms to support music teachers. In our prototype system, we used xylophone as a real musical instrument, and the xylophone is used as the input device for the serious game, so we have named it “XyloStories”. In order to link xylophe and the serious game, we used Arduino for sensor module and Rasberry pi as a signal processing unit. In this paper, we describe the outline of the serious game system. It will also be demonstrated at interactive session.