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“Teaching a Computer to Sing” investigates how middle school students—aged ten to fourteen—build critical thinking and problem-solving skills through informal, yet cogent learning activities in a voluntary after-school choral program. This presentation explores how deploying age-appropriate, music-centered, and technology-mediated pursuits gives middle school students a chance to explore the connections between academic fields that are normally offered as isolated, grade-specific courses in formal classrooms.
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Teaching A Computer To Sing (TACTS): Integrating Computing and Music in a Middle School, After‐School Program
This paper reports on an after‐school program that introduced middle school students to computing through music. The program ran for two years, from October 2015 through April 2017. It involved singing, encoding music with ABC notation, and programming music with Pencil Code. We describe the program’s goals and the activities students pursued, as well as suggestions for improvement. While rigorous evaluation of such a program is difficult, we present survey and focus group results that show that students’ attitudes toward the program were positive and that they did learn some programming.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1515767
- PAR ID:
- 10063991
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of computing sciences in colleges
- Volume:
- 33
- Issue:
- 6
- ISSN:
- 1937-4771
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 63-75
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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