I just stumbled across something called Guitar Rising. It’s basically the idea that everyone knew was coming sooner or later: an attempt to use a Guitar Hero-like game to teach real guitar.

I’m not sold on their approach though. They’ve got 6 lines, one for each of the strings. So far so good. Notes scroll along the neck of the guitar and you play then when they cross the marker line, just like Guitar Hero/generic random rhythm game. For the frets they’ve put a number in each dot.

I’ve got a number of issues with their approach. First of all, Guitar Hero works because the guitar controller has a 1-dimensional interface: 5 buttons all in a line. On the two-dimensional screen, GH uses the horizontal axis for the buttons and the vertical axis for time.

A real guitar on the other hand has a 2-dimensional interface: the six strings on one axis and the frets on the other. There’s also the issue of each hand interacting with the strings in a different way, but even if we just concentrate on the fret hand Guitar Rising still has some issues. For one thing, the visuals are counter-productive and actually work against effective instruction. On screen, the horizontal axis is used for time, but its orientation and the graphics used make it look like the frets on the guitar. The player/learner has to overcome the graphical cues to get at the actual information. That’s not how graphics are supposed to work; they’re supposed to help with understanding, not get in the way.

Another issue I’ve got is with the use of numbers to indicate the fret on the guitar. It might work, but my initial opinion is that reading the numbers on the fly is too much of a mental load on top of everything else. I wouldn’t be surprised if successful learners/players end up having to completely memorize the fingerings ahead of time. Guitar Hero works so well in part because it doesn’t demand much from the brain in the way of interpreting symbols. Position reinforced with color for button, dots are critical, dots with lines are important but less so, and the glowing dots mean something but you don’t have to deal with that until you’re ready. Reading the numbers and then mapping them to the fret on the guitar could be a problem.

I don’t think the color is used as well as it could be either. Right now it’s like Guitar Hero where the strings are represented by both on-screen position and by color. So we have the strings presented quite strongly, with the frets being left as a number that’s easy to lose among the rest of the visuals. Even if they made no other changes, they really ought to tie color to the fret. Position alone is probably strong enough for the strings; it’s good enough for me in Guitar Hero while Star Power is active. Using color for the frets could help their presentation quite a bit.

And how the heck are you supposed to activate Star Power on a real guitar?

Just recently, our research group was notified that we had been awarded a grant to build a prototype tangible interaction interface for geometry instruction for early elementary learners. When I share this idea with others, it still raises eyebrows as to what I’m talking about. Well, now that the Apple iPhone and iTouch, and Microsoft Surface Computing, have increasingly become recognizable to larger audiences, it seems the time has come for this idea.

A recent article in ComputerWorld provides a satisfying overview of this new era of interaction with computers and digital information. An excerpt from the article illustrates a connection between work among our group and the larger research community:

Pradeep Khosla, professor of electrical and computer engineering and robotics at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, says touch technology will proliferate, but not by itself. “When we talk face to face, I make eye gestures, face gestures, hand gestures, and somehow you interpret them all to understand what I am saying. I think that’s where we are headed,” he says. “There is room for all these things, and multimodal gestures will be the future.”

What makes our research distinct, then, is that we are also examining the integral role of gesture in problem solving and learning. Thus, our investigation attempts to analyze how talk, gesture, and interaction with physical and virtual devices differently mediate geometric sense making of young learners. Hopefully, this will provide insights into the design of future learning technologies for the classroom and elsewhere.

Full article: Give your computer the finger: Touch-screen tech comes of age