In Tuesday’s (4/29) San Francisco Chronicle, Jessica Zack writes about the San Francisco Symphony’s redesigned educational website SFSKids.org, launched in February. At a recent class at a San Francisco elementary school, “The youths delved right into the site’s six interactive modules.… ‘I love this,’ said fifth-grader Dorian Castillo Schott, 10, who plays xylophone, drums and piano and was exploring the site’s ‘Instrument Garden.’ … SFSKids utilizes interactive computer game-play experiences ‘all intentionally designed in a gaming language 8- to 13-year-olds understand,’ says the Symphony’s director of education, Ron Gallman.… [SFSKids lead developer Walter] Scacchi’s team … was influenced by the multimedia efforts of Morton Subotnick ‘Creating Music’ and ‘Making Music’ and the websites of the New York Philharmonic and Carnegie Hall. The SFSKids conducting module was inspired by Michael Tilson Thomas’ tutorials for ‘Keeping Score’ on PBS. The site is intentionally free of charge and requires no log-in or user name. It can run on older desktops.… Scacchi is driven by the idea that students of music should experience the same freedom all children do when, at a very young age, they are given crayons and paper and left to draw, scribble, get messy and just see what happens artistically.”
Posted April 29, 2014
