By Cathy Spaulding
Irving Elementary School second-grader Dallas Mastin strikes a key on a keyboard and watches a dot flutter up a computer screen to its target.
“I got 88 percent, and this is like my first time,” the boy boasts after a mission accomplished.
Dallas isn’t zapping enemies; he’s learning music.
Irving is one of five Muskogee schools that teach music and basic piano keyboarding with through a computerized curriculum called Piano Wizard.
With Piano Wizard, students strike notes on a computerized piano keyboard that must correspond to musical notes appearing on the computer screen.
“It’s just like Guitar Hero,” Irving music teacher Mellissa Agee said, referring to a popular video game controlled by an electronic toy guitar.
However, any similarities with the game stop there.
The Piano Wizard screen shows notes rising to corresponding piano keys. Students must strike the right keys on their own keyboards before the screen notes hit the keys. Students learn actual songs.
Once they learn the keyboard, students advance to subsequent levels in which the keyboard switches to the left side of the screen, and corresponding notes move left on lines.
Here, the students learn where notes go on a musical staff, Agee said. As levels advance, the dots become notes on a staff, switch from color to black and white, then are played to the rhythm of the song (whole note, quarter note, eighth note).
Once those levels are mastered, students leave the screen behind and play real music on real keyboards, Agee said.
Students also learn math, she said.
“All music is math,” Agee explained. “There is a major-minor system, a seven-note scale (the eighth note in an octave is the same note as the first) and you even think sequentially.”
Agee, who calls herself a “big piano player,” said Piano Wizard is not like the traditional way she and most other people learned piano. With traditional lessons, students learn the E-G-B-D-F musical scale before learning the keyboard.
Robbie Brady, an educator with the Piano Wizard Group, said students learn music by learning the black-white notation. They learn the black, or minor, keys first.
The program isn’t just kid stuff. Brady said the program advances to college level.
“We have Bach, Beethoven, even Billy Joel’s ‘Piano Man,’” she said.
Dallas said the piano lesson was “both easy and hard.”
