![](bgb.png)
cussed the early results gathered with primary school
students aged 8 to 11 and coming from 4 classes of 2
Italian institutes.
Regarding future works, there are multiple di-
rections to take. The first one concerns the exten-
sion of experimental activities to a wider audience
of users, potentially presenting different characteris-
tics in terms of age, school grade, geographic ori-
gin, previous musical experience and skills, and so on.
Other school teachers interested in the project have al-
ready been contacted, and only the uncertainty due to
the COVID-19 pandemic has stopped the launch of a
larger-scale experimentation. Gathering more data is
expected to make more statistically significant trends
emerge.
Other considerations about the suitability of the
platform for distant education are likely to emerge in
the near future. In fact, so far the platform has been
used either in class, under the direct supervision of
teachers, or at home, in a relaxed out-of-school envi-
ronment. A third way is not only possible, but also
probable: a new lockdown for Italian schools could
foster the adoption of the platform for remote and
synchronous school activities. In this case, it will be
interesting to analyze student performances and com-
pare them to the previously mentioned scenarios.
Another direction for future work concerns plat-
form design and implementation. Field trials high-
lighted a number of minor bugs, promptly exploited
by smarter students to artificially improve their re-
sults. In this sense, our beta testers demonstrated to
be very motivated to cheat the system. An example
was the extremely quick repetition of mouse clicks
over the current change in order to get additional score
points, an effect obtained by exploiting the very nar-
row tolerance window introduced to manage clicks
not perfectly timed. This bug was solved as soon as it
was detected by reading data; anyway, it did not inval-
idate performance analysis since we did not base our
considerations on score points, which are presented in
the interface only to improve motivation. Concerning
the latter aspect, in a future release we are planning
to further enhance gamification aspects, e.g. by in-
troducing hall-of-fame and leaderboard functions in
order to increase user’s engagement. One interesting
remark that came from one teacher is that, in the ab-
sence of such features, students started to share their
scores by taking pictures of their game results and
sending them to the class chat.
An aspect to further investigate concerns the evo-
lution of the engagement level when students, on one
side, get accustomed to the game play, and, on the
other side, have to face harder exercises. The data
collected so far do not allow to make inferences about
the long-term trend and understand to what extent stu-
dent engagement is due to the novelty of the platform
rather than the idea itself.
From the educators’ perspective, the availability
of a web tool to support music-education activities
has been appreciated by the teachers who decided to
take part into this initiative. Anyway, being an early
experimentation that involved 4 classes only, we can-
not make general statements about teacher’s accep-
tance and level of satisfaction. This aspect will be
further investigated in future experimentation, that is
planned to involve a much higher number of schools
and classes.
The song dataset, currently constituted by 44
pieces, will be further extended and customized
thanks to the contribution of educators, based on their
educational goals. New pieces can be prepared offline
by teachers, but, at present, they can be added to the
platform only by system administrators. The working
group is also planning to implement back-end tools to
let teachers upload their materials independently.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We wish to thank Giuseppina Verile and Ivana Lan-
zanova, the principals of the “Istituto Comprensivo
Lucilio”, Sessa Aurunca, Caserta (Italy) and of the
“Istituto Ancelle della Carit
`
a”, Palazzolo sull’Oglio,
Brescia (Italy), respectively. For their active coopera-
tion in the experimental activities, we are also grateful
to Sonia Vezza, teacher, and Maurizio Botti, Maura
Castelnovo, Ottavia Marini and Sara Valente, students
of the Master Degree in Technologies for Music Edu-
cation of the Conservatory “Luca Marenzio”, Brescia
(Italy).
REFERENCES
Avanzini, F., Barat
`
e, A., Ludovico, L. A., and Mandanici,
M. (2019a). A computer-based approach to teach
tonal harmony to young students. In Proceedings of
the 11
th
International Conference on Computer Sup-
ported Education (CSEDU 2019), volume 1, pages
271–279. SCITEPRESS - Science and Technology
Publications, Lda.
Avanzini, F., Barat
`
e, A., Ludovico, L. A., and Mandanici,
M. (2019b). Metrics for the automatic assessment of
music harmony awareness in children. In Proceed-
ings of the 16
th
Sound & Music Computing Confer-
ence (SMC 2019), pages 372–379. SMC.
Avanzini, F., Barat
`
e, A., Ludovico, L. A., and Mandanici,
M. (2020). A web platform to foster and assess tonal
harmony awareness. In Computer Supported Edu-
Songs in Music Education: Design and Early Experimentation of a Web Tool for the Recognition of Harmonic Changes
719