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Rock beats pulse through the music studio as Josh Deuyour, 12, takes center stage.
He’s been practicing the guitar for less than two months, but his fingers dance from fret to fret like an expert. He bobs his head, his mop of hair swaying with his body. He looks like a real rock star — except for one important point: He’s not playing the guitar. He’s playing “Guitar Hero.”
The video game has become so popular it’s attracting a new generation to guitar lessons and the classic rock music of their parents, music tutors say.
At this studio, the owner has set up the game in a common area. His students are playing between their real lessons, which seldom sound as polished. Although some guitar instructors resent the game as a distraction from actual practice — and no one claims that playing “Guitar Hero” compares to the real thing — others are encouraged by the interest it’s generating.
Josh says the game is the reason he decided to take guitar lessons.
“It was fun and interesting. I thought: ‘This is something I could do,’ ” he says.
Same goes for Dalton McLaughlin, 12, who waits for his turn to play.
“Some of the songs sounded really, really awesome, so I’m like, ‘Why can’t I learn this on a real guitar?’ ” Dalton says.
For the uninitiated, “Guitar Hero” and similar games such as “Rock Band” are equipped with guitar-shaped controllers that have five color-coded fret buttons. Players press the corresponding buttons as colored “notes” stream across the TV screen in time to the music.
Skilled players earn bonus points and applause from onlookers. Poor ones are booed off the stage.
North American sales of “Guitar Hero” topped $1 billion in the previous 26 months, video game publisher Activision reported in January. The game first came out in 2005.

modbee.com

Rob Eastaway grins at his teenage audience. “Here’s how to win a bet at the pub - if you’re allowed in, of course.” Giggles and murmurs as he rattles through demonstrations of card shuffles, newspaper predictions, coin tricks and the likelihood of people lying. “It’s maths masquerading as magic,” he explains, going on to debunk TV magician Darren Brown’s “psychology” as cheapjack probability.
The audience is gripped, texting quick tips to friends on silenced mobiles as they marvel at the Gilbreath shuffle (a way to ensure that a stacked deck stays stacked), Benford’s Law (which predicts that in most sets of numbers those beginning with 1 have a 30% greater likelihood of appearing than others, and Penney Ante (a coin-flipping con-trick described by Walter Penney in 1969).
Several hundred year 10, 11 and 12 students have come into Southampton for a maths field trip. They were sceptical - 15-year-old Simon Preston and his mates at Gregg College thought “it was going to be really boring” - but after an interactive three hours decoding puzzles, learning how to build sports stadiums and quizzing speakers on embarrassing maths moments, the crowd of teenagers bounces out of the lecture hall agreeing with 17-year-old Alice Pinkley from Havant College: “It was entertainment as well as maths, and you don’t usually get that.”
While the government bemoans the lack of keen young mathematicians in schools and sets up the National Centre for Excellence in Teaching Mathematics (NCETM), Eastaway, together with his friend and co-populariser Simon Singh (author of Fermat’s Last Theorem and The Code Book), has been running Maths Inspiration events since 2004. “As a nation, it’s numbers and creativity and hard work that can save us from stiff competition from India and China,” says Eastaway, who was until recently president of the Mathematical Association. This year, more than 8,000 people attended 11 events. Eastaway believes that the way to grow more mathematicians is to tap into popular culture and share the playfulness of mathematics as well as its rigour and purity.

education.guardian.co.uk