Developing an educational game for art education - gesture recognition-based performance guidance for Mozart’s opera magic flute

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to develop an educational game, which is used for opera or musical classes. In recent years, art education has been widely emphasized because it helped to develop students’ creativity and imagination. Also, many educators and researchers argue that STEM education, which aims to boosting students’ interest and competitiveness in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, should be amended to STEAM where the letter “A” refers to the field of Art. The opera consists of many dimensions which makes it unique as a whole such as the human voice, the orchestral music, the visual arts, the drama, and the dance. Hence all, the components of opera theater are included all STEAM fields. The use of a serious game for art education, especially, opera the Mozart’s Magic Flute has a number of advantages with respect to increasing student interest. Students play this game to learn and practice the characters of opera by following gesture recognition-based performance guidance for Mozart’s Magic Flute. The game is directed by student’s movements and gestures which are recognized the RGB-D camera. The context of the game consisted of acting, role playing, singing songs, dancing, doing art, and speaking. The player will be able to learn different activities and enjoy by following Mozart’s Magic Flute’s guidance in the game. The art education game was exhibited for four days at the 2014 Education Donation Fair. During playing the game, students were passionate to approach the game-based learning and students were thrilled by following most of the components of an art game. Additionally, the students are actively participating in the game-based leaning and the outcome was remarkable. This game doesn’t have the automatic evaluation system for students’ performance. So, we needed teaching artists for introduce this game-based learning class for opera to students. Their brief guidance and teaching is a component of gamebased learning.