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Broadening interest in computer science is a major research goal of the 21st century. Many initiatives use traditional “hooks” to attract students, such as video games and robotics. Unfortunately, this tends to attract only those already interested in computer science. One alternative domain gaining momentum in computer science education research is music, which is showing interesting results with participants that have previous music knowledge. This paper presents a case study of teaching computer programming with music, in Brazil, to students with limited formal music experience. Through data collected in surveys, focus groups, and researchers’ observations, we show that in this context students can still learn and thrive as musical programmers.
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Using Domain-Specific, Immediate Feedback to Support Students Learning Computer Programming to Make Music
Broadening participation in computer science has been widely stud- ied, creating many diferent techniques to attract, motivate, and engage students. A common meta-strategy is to use an outside do- main as a hook, using the concepts in that domain to teach computer science. These domains are selected to interest the student, but stu- dents often lack a strong background in these domains. Therefore, a strategy designed to increase students’ interest, motivation, and engagement could actually create more barriers for students, who now are faced with learning two new topics. To reduce this poten- tial barrier in the domain of music, this paper presents the use of automated, immediate feedback during programming activities at a summer camp that uses music to teach foundational programming concepts. The feedback guides students musically, correcting notes that are out-of-key or rhythmic phrases that are too long or short, allowing students to focus their learning on the computer science concepts. This paper compares the correctness of students that re- ceived automated feedback with students that did not, which shows the efectiveness of the feedback. Follow up focus groups with stu- dents confrmed this quantitative data, with students claiming that the feedback was not only useful but that the activities would be much more challenging without the feedback.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2048793
- PAR ID:
- 10410078
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- l ACM conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE)
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Broadening interest in computer science is a major research goal of the 21st century. Many initiatives use traditional “hooks” to attract students, such as video games and robotics. Unfortunately, this tends to attract only those already interested in computer science. One alternative domain gaining momen- tum in computer science education research is music, which is showing inter- esting results with participants that have previous music knowledge. This paper presents a case study of teaching computer programming with music, in Brazil, to students with limited formal music experience. Through data collected in sur- veys, focus groups, and researchers’ observations, we show that in this context students can still learn and thrive as musical programmers.more » « less
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