Very few music festivals have education components in their programs, but the National Folk Festival does and does again. First, it revives its masterclass program through its partnership with Music for Everyone (MFE), an arts/music organisation that operates out of the Ainslie Arts Centre in Canberra, and second, it has dedicated interactive pages for teachers and students on its website as an add-on plug in.
The schools component has lesson ideas and downloadable activity sheets to support all curriculum areas and they come copyright free for all Australian classrooms. One interactive takes students around the world with stopovers for the parts where various violins and fiddles originated. Another opens a 3D model of a violin to reveal its construction. Fact sheets and a quiz mix the serious with the curious, for instance, until Mozart, Vivaldi and Bach wrote pieces for violin, the instrument was played mostly by the lower classes, but none of them as fast as Ben Lee, who set a world record in April 2010 playing all 810 notes of Flight of the Bumblebee in a mere 64.21 seconds at the rate of almost 13 notes per second.
