Pedagogical Foundation to Promote Students' Engagement and Creativity While Co-creating a Music Learning Game

This study, conducted by Astrid Marin-Jimenez and Francis Dubé at Laval University, examines how students aged 10 to 14 can be guided through the co-creation of a music learning game. The authors argue that music education lacks documented pedagogical principles for creative approaches such as game co-creation, even though existing literature links this kind of work to gains in creativity and engagement. To address this gap, the research combines Kangas's Creative and Playful Learning model and Lin's Creative Pedagogy model into a framework covering how activities are structured, how the researcher teaches, and how participants' creative responses are interpreted.

The study involved seven students who met weekly over ten sessions. Their concrete outcome was a game titled "The War of Six Clans." The researchers made deliberate choices about resources, furniture arrangement, and an autonomy-supportive activity design to foster participation. Analysis drew on Lucas's five creative dimensions and O'Neill's engagement factors through deductive thematic coding. During the orientation phase, participants displayed curiosity, discipline, and collaboration, which the authors interpret as evidence that the teaching strategies worked as intended.

The findings should be read as qualitative observations from a single phase rather than broad quantitative results, and the sample is small. Still, the work responds to a clear need for practical guidance that teachers can use when implementing creative, game-based approaches in music classrooms. The supporting literature, which spans creative pedagogy, game-design learning, and music teaching, reinforces the premise that student-driven game design can promote engagement, creativity, and deeper learning.