Melody Mystery: Learning Music Theory through Escape Room Puzzles

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The subject of the article is of great interest, welcome, and the author is obviously competent in the field of music theory.

Justifying the experiment, outside and in the classroom, the structure of the survey suggests a qualitative research, through an interview applied.

 

I consider it is necessary to better visualize the results, through figures or graphs that show, comparatively, the answers of the students.

 

The conclusions are generally presented, a more accurate rendering of the level of education obtained (scales, chords, etc.) would be useful for musicians.

 

The bibliography cites old works, there is a small number of researched sources, anchoring in current research. I believe that with the help of contemporary  resources the author could  offer a methodological perspective, for teachers interested in technology-mediated education, presented in the discussion chapter.

Author Response

we thank the reviewer for the time and effort invested, for which we are grateful.

“I consider it is necessary to better visualize the results, through figures or graphs that show, comparatively, the answers of the students.”

we have re-expressed the findings section using the appropriate journal formatting for tables, in which data within table cells reflects the verbatim comments from participants in response to questions from the interview.

"The conclusions are generally presented, a more accurate rendering of the level of education obtained (scales, chords, etc.) would be useful for musicians.”

We did not really set out to increase the level of education of the participants, as we were constrained by the overall timeframe allotted institutionally for the project, which dictated that conceptualisation, design, enactment and analysis had to be completed within about nine months. We set out to explore the extent to which introduction to theory might be achieved through game-narratives, as opposed to explicit and didactic instruction. We envisage gameplay as augments to such explicit instruction. We have clarified our intent in 'Materials and Methods'.

“The bibliography cites old works, there is a small number of researched sources, anchoring in current research. I believe that with the help of contemporary resources, the author could offer a methodological perspective, for teachers interested in technology-mediated education, presented in the discussion chapter.”

Thank you for showing us a way forward with the Discussion. We have taken onboard your advice and have grounded the Discussion in the literature so as to tease out coherence between our reported study and the wider trajectory of epistemic games and learning.

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear Authors and Editors.

 

I have enjoyed your research very much but I find a number of very serious difficulties.

First of all, the methodology section does not correspond to a research methodology but to a teaching methodology. I like the idea of explaining the sessions in a teaching methodology, but it is absolutely necessary that you explain the scientific method. At this point, it is not at all clear to me how the scientific method has been followed, how the improvement of the students has been measured. Your contribution is an evaluation, very interesting, but you have to address very clearly the procedure and design. On the other hand, the results have been difficult for me to understand from my researcher self. I have understood them because I am a teacher by profession and this may be a difficulty for other readers. Clarify this section, use tables and figures that allow a clearer presentation of the results. The students' contributions are not enough. The next serious problem is the discussion, in which there should be a discussion but there is not. This happens because your introduction is not strong enough. Broaden the introduction, talk more about escape rooms, music didactics, skills to be developed, cognitive and psychological abilities. Think that the standard is about 50 or 60 references. Address these issues, because lacking these elements, the article should be rejected. Make a big effort, the research has potential.

 

 

Author Response

we are grateful for your time and effort in reviewing our manuscript.

as far as practicable we have attempted to do our best to understand the intent behind the suggestions and critique and to take them onboard as we made our revisions.

with respect to the comment that "the students' contributions are not enough", we respectfully would like to suggest that we may not have made sufficiently clear to readers that the two participants were not the the same persons as the two student-researchers responsible for the conceptualisation, enactment and analysis of the game. the two participants were peers of the student-researchers. the student-researchers effort levels are described at the end of the manuscript, in the section 'Author Contributions'. we apologise this was not made clear in our original manuscript (in section 2.1 'Participant profiles and logistics').

"I like the idea of explaining the sessions in a teaching methodology, but it is absolutely necessary that you explain the scientific method."

We thank you for bringing our attention to our omission. We have framed the study from the perspective of an exploratory case study, aligned with Merriam (2009), Creswell (2013), and Yin (2017).

“use tables and figures that allow a clearer presentation of the results"

we have re-expressed the responses of the participants in table-form. we thank you for your forbearance.

“Broaden the introduction, talk more about escape rooms, music didactics, skills to be developed, cognitive and psychological abilities.”

we have done as you have directed us, and have - in our Introduction - contextualised our study more explicitly.

thank you very much, once again. we are grateful for your guidance.

 

Reviewer 3 Report

In an interesting way, the article talks about a video game that tries to help students learn about music theory. It is a good idea to try something new with something that students often find boring and repetitive. It is a pity that the sample of research participants was not larger. The review of relevant literature should also be more extensive and recent.

 

Author Response

we would like to express our gratitude for the time and effort invested in reviewing our manuscript.

we are grateful for the encouragement, and we understand and concur that “The review of relevant literature should also be more extensive and recent.”

We have added to the literature and review of sources - both seminal and current - and have attempted to draw relevance to the cited sources in several relevant parts of the manuscript, including the Introduction and Discussion.

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear Authors and Editor. The article has improved considerably. Please add in the limitations section that this is a case study. On the other hand, I explained to them that this methodology is not correct for their purpose. In your next research be sure to reach out to at least 30 people from our

The use of the case study is very, very forced in this research.

Author Response

dear Reviewer and Editor,

we acknowledge your perspective and understand the validity of your views.

we will bide closely with your advice and guidance for subsequent work, and we remain grateful for your forbearance and patience as you guide us.

for the present manuscript, we have done as you have directed us: "please add in the limitations section that this is a case study."

in the Limitations, we have inserted the following text in blue highlight, making it as explicit as we can that our approach has inherent limitations.

"As project constraints dictated that the study was carried out among two participants, the investigation was approached qualitatively, and no generalizability is claimed from this exploratory case study."

we thank you for your time and continual effort, and we wish you the very best in your own work and endeavours.

sincerely.