Description: An activity to learn how the piano keyboard works, how notes are written on a musical staff and explore music composition by loading and saving your work.

Prerequisite: Familiarity with note naming conventions, note-names activity useful to learn this notation.

Goal: Develop an understanding of music composition, and increase interest in making music with a piano keyboard. This activity covers many fundamental aspects of music, but there is much more to explore about music composition. If you enjoy this activity but want a more advanced tool, try downloading MuseScore (http://musescore.org/en/download), an open source music notation tool.

Manual: This activity has several levels, each level adds a new functionality to the previous level.
Level 1: basic piano keyboard (white keys only) and students can experiment with clicking the colored rectangle keys to write music
Level 2: the musical staff switches to bass clef, so pitches are lower than in previous level
Level 3: option to choose between treble and bass clef, additional function includes option to select note duration (quarter, half, and whole notes)
Level 4: addition of black keys (sharp keys)
Level 5: flat notation used for black keys
Level 6: load children's melodies from around the world
Level 7: all features available, with the additional feature to load and save your composition

/discovery/sound_group/piano_composition
http://gcompris.net/screenshots-en.html#piano_composition