Sound 2 Game is an exciting resource produced by UCan

Sound 2 Game is an exciting resource produced by UCan.tv (website at www.ucan.tv) a non profit making organisation specialising in digital learning resources for education.

The program is a set of 5 contrasting arcade games, mostly race games or 'shoot em ups'. All pupils will be familiar with the genre! The games contain the standard sounds associated with firing, explosions, heavy braking, footsteps etc. Pupils have a chance to explore these sounds then compose sounds, edit them and then import them into the games. The end result being that the game sounds are replaced by pupils' own sounds.

The MTRS thought it might be a good idea to give the program some harsh punishment in an inner city secondary schools with Year 9 pupils and a non specialist supply teacher. I was on hand to make notes and give occasional help when it was needed.

Setting up the program was easy. There were 15 computers in the room, not networked so I installed Sound2Game on each along with the accompanying Audacity sound editor. Audacity is an excellent freeware audio editor available at www.audacity.sourceforge.net and enables pupils to sample sounds using a microphone or bits of audio from a CD, trim them, add effects then import them into the game.

The games quickly engaged the pupils and they happily (and noisily) played the games. After about 20 minutes, we stopped the class and each pupil had to choose their favourite sound and discuss the character of the sound. The opening screen of each game gives a handy list of each sound used in that game and you can preview the sound. The discussion was useful because it's important to get pupils talking, using the right vocabulary and engaging with the subject.

Audacity is easy to use and pupils quickly were sampling vocal sounds. We had to watch out for the predictable inappropriate sound of course! The only difficulty here is getting microphones to work with windows sound cards. Confusingly there appears to be an input selector on Audacity where you choose microphone, line in etc. but this enables the user to tweak the input level, not select the input source. Once you know how though, it's easy. Select the speaker icon from the windows toolbar (usually bottom right of the screen) by double clicking. Select OPTIONS > PROPERTIES then click the RECORDING radio button. Make sure Microphone is ticked. The recording control window should now be open. Tick the Microphone box and your microphone should work. If you get horrendous feedback at this stage, turn down your speakers!

Some of the more difficult functions, like exporting wav files were explained on the interactive whiteboard. Pupils followed what the teacher was doing and had little difficulty applying it to their own sample. The audacity disc provided has some good video tutorials but we decided not to use them on this occasion.

Audacity showing a simple sound file sampled from a microphone.

This pupil trimmed any excess noise off the sample, saved it and imported it quickly into Sound2Game.

This shows the audio settings of one of the Sound2Game games.

Clicking on the .wav file name opens a browse window which enables pupils to choose the sound they have edited and saved using Audacity.

Audio sampling is a powerful teaching tool that engages pupils with the largely neglected art of sound editing. It's perhaps odd to think of an ICT activity as an art form but there are many considerations of aesthetics in designing sound effects and music for games. Sound2Game comes with printable worksheets supplied as pdf documents. They are well designed but if they were provided as word documents, pupils could have the option of word processing them and saving them along with their sound files.

The teaching notes provided on the .pdf document are adequate but seem to do the program an injustice. There are two suggested schemes of work, divided into 8 and 6 lessons respectively. The detail is brief and most schools wouldn't accept these as lesson plans or schemes of work. As such they are ideas of how the program might be used within a scheme of work. The most impressive feature of the program is that pupils can import their own sounds into the games. Strangely, this isn't mentioned in either of the schemes of work and the process of importing sounds (as given in the diagram above) isn't described anywhere.

The Audacity video tutorials are excellent, although it took some time to find the index page to the tutorials provided on the CD Rom. If you are a novice to sound editing, the £40 will be a good investment for the disc containing the video tutorials otherwise you will manage without. Subscribers to the MTRS will soon have access to video tutorials of all major music software.

The possibilities of a spiralling music curriculum using Sound2Game are exciting. In a spiralling curriculum, pupils re-visit the same concept each year but increasing in complexity each time it is revisited. Year 7 could easily sample vocal sounds and simple electronic/acoustic sounds then import them into Sound2Game. Year 8 could be given digital effects and more complex sounds to manipulate on Audacity and Year 9 could incorporate looped sounds, background grooves, perhaps sequenced then imported into Audacity. Spiralling curricula are also very handy for teachers to measure progress from one year to the next, especially if they save their work to their own folders on the school network.

Overall, an excellent program with huge possibilities in the classroom. Our pupils found it fun and engaging. Many came back at lunchtime to explore the program further and were happily experimenting with vocal and electronic sounds to import into their games. £100 may sound expensive to some, but not when you consider that this gives schools the ability to install it on as many machines as they like. It is in effect an unlimited site licence for the purchasing institution.