Big Ear: Learn & Make Music

Big Ear empowers all students with musical IQ and future skills.

Music education relies commonly on musical instruments and traditional notation, which create a high threshold! Big Ear makes music learning fun, accessible & sustainable. It focuses on learning "how music works", creativity and social interaction and emphasise future skills e.g. STEM & mental wellbeing. Teacher tools help any teacher to teach and evaluate their students at school or at home.

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Overview

Information on this page is provided by the innovator and has not been evaluated by HundrED.

Web presence

2017

Established

100K

Children

2

Countries

Target group

Students upper

Updated

June 2023

We hope to see more effective music leaning and integration with STEM related subject as well as mental well-being. We believe that a balance between student-driven and teacher-led contexts as well as multi disciplinary approach will make students more future ready! Silent-assessment and self-evaluation foster a responsible attitude. We hope to be an example model to other core subjects!

About the innovation

Why did you create this innovation?

After being a music teacher for 20+ years in vocational/university level, I realised that the "how does music work" question needs to be demystify for students and even teachers.
With a background in computer science I also felt that the value of computational thinking is not emphasised enough.
Game-based learning is very effective in helping students with this abstract subjects.

What does your innovation look like in practice?

Students and teachers use the Big Ear app (multi platform) as their main tool.
There are 3 main areas in the app: musical puzzles, composer and social library.
Special features:
he composer auto-creates puzzles for each saved song.
Any song can be reversed.
Versatile usability: from 100% student driven to teacher-led engagement
The usability cases range from 100% student-driven (with teacher follow up) to teacher-led engagement, in class or remotely.
Examples:
● Students engage with the content of their choice, either in or out the classroom.
● Teacher-led lesson:
- Teachers introduce/demonstrate a musical theme on a large screen (using Big Ear).
- Students are completing a task in the musical theme, individually or in groups.
- Teachers supervise and answer questions.
● Students present their compositions, describe their creative process and get feedback.
For example, others guess the story they hear while expressing emotional context.
A silent-assessment integrated.

How has it been spreading?

We collaborated with a partner, Lang Lang International Music Foundation (USA), that work with schools. From these schools we scaled to the whole districts.
Up to date we have 100,000 school downloads in USA (50% growth last spring).
Most of the spread organic.

If I want to try it, what should I do?

Download the app, freemium content (universal link for android and iOS):
https://bigeargames.page.link/install
Enter a coupon to activate the educational version with teacher or student features.
HUN-TEACH (for teacher side) and HUN-STU (for student side).
The coupon should be entered in the app's shop (teacher/student icon).
Contact us for additional info.

Implementation steps

Approval

District/Municipal Ed IT department approval.
usually related to privacy policies etc.
This will provide district -wide availability on devices for teachers and students.

Study groups creation

Teachers activate their device as a teacher-side and creates study-groups.
For each study group a unique code is auto created.
The teacher share this code with the study-group students (that were activated as student-side), which allow them to join the study-group.
From that moments, the teacher can assign tasks, follow on the progress and evaluate the students.