Music is a central part of adolescent life, and the connections between music, science, and math are vast and deep-rooted in history. In particular, the relationship between sound and the science of waves. This positions musical sound as an ideal avenue for students to explore and connect with science. Listening to Waves (LTW) is a program that introduces adolescents to the physics and technology of music and sound with the goal of improving their attitudes toward science. For this, LTW creates web applications designed to explore and create sound in a playful manner and integrates those applications with hands-on exploration of the physical sonic world. In the case study described in this article, LTW partnered with a large middle school serving low-income and underrepresented students, trained the teachers to use the web applications and associated curriculum (Minces 2021), and worked directly with eighth-grade student participants. Students enjoyed the program and participated enthusiastically. Pre-post surveys indicate that program participation improved the students’ attitudes toward science, including their intention to pursue a science career and their perception of themselves as capable of doing science.
Baby Shark to Barracuda: Analyzing Children’s Music Listening Behavior
Music is an important part of childhood development, with online music listening platforms being a significant channel by which children consume music. Children’s offline music listening behavior has been heavily researched, yet relatively few studies explore how their behavior manifests online. In this paper, we use data from LastFM 1 Billion and the Spotify API to explore online music listening behavior of children, ages 6–17, using education levels as lenses for our analysis. Understanding the music listening behavior of children can be used to inform the future design of recommender systems.
- Award ID(s):
- 1751278
- Publication Date:
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10316668
- Journal Name:
- Fifteenth ACM Conference on Recommender Systems
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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