As new musical styles have emerged in the twentieth century with characteristic sounds, chords, forms, meters, and intervals, teachers need to broaden and re-define the way they introduce musical concepts to beginning piano students. The purpose of this study is to offer different instructional possibilities aside from conventional methods of teaching beginning pianists. This is accomplished through a comparison of the two different approaches of the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók and the American composer Ross Lee Finney. Bartók’s Mikrokosmos, a graded set of 153 pieces, and Finney's 32 Piano Games are examined through this paper.