Jonny Martyr
Charanga Music World
A world of musical learning
Charanga Music is an established startup providing online educational resources for teachers and pupils in schools around the world.
I was given the tremendous opportunity to product manage and lead design for a brand new online learning environment, focussed on providing an engaging and innovative experience for kids taking their first steps in the world of music.
I took learnings from my experience in the video games industry as well as the burgeoning trend for gamification to explore new approaches to musical education. Rather than a dry, unimaginative directory of lessons I envisaged a vibrant, interactive videogame-inspired experience that would engage and reward kids for learning and practicing their instruments. The result was a massively successful new pillar for the business which has remained a key product offering many years later, with hundreds of thousands of pupils, teachers and parents experiencing the platform across the world.
The Brief
Charanga’s two founding partners had identified the need for an LMS (Learning Management System) that was accessible to pupils outside of the classroom to complement their main, teacher-led product. They asked me to lead design and product management for this new project.
At first, the expectation was for a standard LMS, w a basic “click link to view lesson” experience. However, early interviews with teachers and parents pointed to a greater problem that our new product could solve: the early stages of learning an instrument are very dull, and many pupils drop out before they get to the more exciting parts. How might we create an experience that keeps pupils engaged during this slow start, and encourage them to keep up their instrument?
The Process
Off the back of our initial problem statement research I identified that making our LMS engaging on its own was going to be key to its success. I lent on gamification and other game design principles to create a meta experience on top of the learning process, so that disengaged pupils would be buoyed by these mechanics and incentivised to continue learning.
This manifested in a design for an online “world” of music – inspired by classic RPGs and games like Super Mario World and Donkey Kong Country, our LMS became a world map through which the pupil would adventure. Completing lessons and activities would earn them coins, which could be exchanged for new items for their in-world avatar.
I collaborated closely with our graphic designer to establish a look and feel for the world, and carefully created a reward mechanic that would keep the pupil engaged without overloading them. From the initial design stage I progressed into a product manager role, liaising with devs, designers and product owners to keep everything on track.
Once the product started to take shape I conducted guerilla testing with teachers and parents to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the design and keep it on track to solving the initial problem.
Being a small team, I also took on a number of other tasks related to development, from some coding & UI design through to bug testing and customer support. I also produced teaching materials (complete with VOs and backing tracks) to support key learning resources, which was a nice chance to exercise the musical muscles.
Challenges
While the team had many years’ of experience delivering web-based software, the more open-ended and iterative process of creating game mechanics took some adaptation, and there was often not space to explore and experiment to find the right approach. To overcome this, I focussed on tried-and-tested mechanics (such as earning tokens for completing certain actions) and ensuring that common interactions were rewarding and engaging in themselves. Early testing showed that in many cases the art style, microinteractions and basic mechanics were engaging enough themselves, which meant we didn’t have to expend energy on creating more complex systems and could therefore keep the project lean.
The Outcome
Charanga Music World launched in 2012 and continues to be a key product in Charanga’s lineup, with hundreds of thousands of students and teachers engaging annually across the UK and Europe. The product was a key factor in the company’s expansion, and has made it into classrooms as far away as Australia.
Despite being a project from earlier in my career, Charanga Music World remains one of my proudest achievements. Hearing the stories from teachers and parents about their pupils’ newfound dedication to their instruments was hugely rewarding and I’m glad to have had the opportunity to create something new and exciting that still lives and grows today.
I struggled for ages to get my son to practice his clarinet. Now it’s the first thing he wants to do when he gets home from school!
– Parent of a clarinettist