Serious Games for Music Education - A Mobile Application to Learn Clef Placement on the Stave

According to recent researches, gaming can be used in educational contexts to improve learning processes. In this work, at first serious games are introduced by defining their key features, then their applicability to the music education field will be discussed. Finally, the paper will present a specific case study focusing on real-time solfège of scores with frequent clef changes. The resulting pedagogical game, called iClef, has been designed and implemented to run on mobile devices such as the iPhone and iPad.