"Мой дедушка сейчас играет на скрипке."
Translation:My grandfather is playing the violin now.
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That should work, as «сейчас» refers to something at the present time.
I had put "My grandpa is playing the violin right now"--I think that's also an acceptable answer
Is this in the Prepositional, or the Dative (when you play an instrument)? What about games, board games, sports?
Instruments are put into prepositional (на гитаре, на скрипке), games/sports are accusative (в футбол, в карты).
How on earth can "My grandfather is now playing the guitar" be incorrect but "My grandfather is playing the guitar now" is correct? They mean exactly the same thing.
Is дедушка (grandfather) a masculine noun? Up until now, I had assumed it was feminine as its accusative form ends in -у like with feminine nouns, but the use of мой here implies it must be masculine.
Nouns that denote a male person by definition ("папа"- "dad", "дедушка" - "grandfather", "дядя" - "uncle", "мужчина" - "man", etc) are masculine despite the ending.
It's good to know about this Russian peculiarity - is this rule ("nouns that denote a male person by definition (...) are masculine") generally true and can always be relied upon, or is it just the "usual" case that has its exceptions?
Yes, if a noun ending with "-а" or "-я" can't possibly be applied to a woman, then it's masculine.
There are also so called common gender nouns, that change their gender depending on the person. For example "a judge" is "судья". If you want to say "this judge" it would be "этот судья" if male and "эта судья" if female.
Also there is a word "персона" which is always feminine even if you talk about a man. (There might be others, but I can't remember any off the top of my head.)