Team Spotlight: Chris Mallett

What is your role within Practice Space?
I am the co-founder of Practice Space with Robert Miller.

Where did the inspiration for Practice Space come from?
After starting the California Conservatory of Music with Robert in 2011, we quickly realized that the best way to motivate students is to create practice challenges and incentives. We spent years handing out paper point charts to all of our teachers and students. The students would bring them home, and many times we would never see the sheet again, or it would remain blank. We started thinking about improving the system we used at school because it was successful in many ways, and students were practicing more. Still, we wanted to create something more engaging that students could relate to, and that's when we came up with the concept of Practice Space. The gamification aspect of Practice Space attracts students to keep coming back every day to use it. Teachers love how it organizes everything they need to include for their students, such as adding assignments, attachments, and a favorite for both students and teachers, adding videos.

How has Practice Space improved your own musical experience?
Practice Space makes my students excited to practice and helps them remember all the small details we talk about in the lesson, which can be a lot of stuff to remember, especially for advanced students. It used to be a pain to record videos and then remember to send them to students, and they would sit on my phone all week, taking up space. Now my students have all of their information in one place, and each week I add their assignments and attachments quickly and easily into their lesson.

How has playing music impacted your life?
Playing music has taken me around the world and has introduced me to some of my closest friends. Robert and I have a classical guitar duo that performs regularly. Recently, we had the opportunity to go back to southeast Asia to tour Singapore and Indonesia just before the pandemic. With Practice Space, we wanted to try and integrate our love of teaching and performing into the platform to help inspire the next generation of young musicians.