Toddlers Testing DDMM: Evaluation Results and Ideas towards Creating Better Learning Environments for Small Children

Abstract

Most musical instruments provide children with a rather complex user interface and unfamiliar possibilities of interaction, which do not appear in their daily experience of the world. This complicates the process of creating harmonic melodies and may lead to dissonance and frustration. Thus, the main goal of our reasearch project „Drum-Dance-Music-Machine“ is the development of a toolset for early childhood music education, that facilitates a low-threshold access to collaborative music making. For this purpose, a prototypical new instrument has been constructed, offering the simple interface of a drum, but producing notes and melodies. Furthermore, with this system it is possible to create music by dancing and changing its parameters through movement. Amongst others, this aspect can be used to explain and clarify the meaning of abstract musical terms. During the ongoing development and after further enhancements we tested the system in two phases in order to ascertain our predefined goals. Amongst others, the children were asked to give their mind on their rating of this new instrument and tell if it is easy or difficult to create music with. Furthermore, we collected subjective assumptions from parents and educators, test observations and objective measurement data, combined them and analysed the results in terms of various aspects to verify the suitability of the system for use in early education.