Resumo

The usage of digital educational games in processes of teaching and learning has been grown strongly since the availability of new tecnologies to our Society. In this paper, we present the Learning Object called “O Som no Labirinto”, which the goal is the development of the auditive perception of musical instrument timbres. The game was built through the game engine Unity 3D, together with the programming language javascript and designed for children between 4 and 8 years old. It consists in the challenge of helping a character to get out of a maze, guiding it through the recognition of the sound of many musical instruments. The software conception was based on the pedagogical ideas from Schafer (2001) and Guia e França (2015), an was developed using the spiral model with prototypes, process that envolved a interdisciplinar team formed by a interface designer, a project manager, a music education specialist and a programmer. The design brings digital art technics creating then a user-friendly interface, which tries to guide the player in a fluid and intuitive way. Moreover, the recording of actual instrument recording was used, what makes the sound quality better then through the use of MIDI files. In the current stage of developing, the game has activities with woodwind instruments in a prototype for web browsers. In the next prototypes, another families of instruments will be included, and versions of the program for different platforms will be ready to lunch for mobiles and tablets. Tests about the pedadogical eficiency of the game with children are about to carried out, making possible the improvement the application.