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Students of all socioeconomic backgrounds love music and express their identity through music. There are strong historical connections between music and computing, and computer-based music has a heavy presence in contemporary popular culture. Thus, programming electronic music can provide the type of authentic learning experience that fosters participation in computer science (CS) by minoritized students. Although important efforts have been made in that direction, they have not reached young children in mainstream public classrooms, particularly in schools serving children from low-income and marginalized backgrounds. Developing a computational tool and educational program that reaches this key demographic holds the potential to greatly increase CS knowledge and participation in the future workforce. For this, our team has created M-flow, a flow-based music programming platform that seeks to be engaging for children from the outset, and that makes it extremely easy for non-specialized teachers to learn and implement CS activities in the classroom. 

The science of sound presents a holistic learning opportunity to engage embodied intelligence and lived experience in mutually shared soundscapes where material objects become sites for the pursuit of curiosity and aesthetic beauty. When young people are presented with this view of the realm of science learning and practice, the possibility for alignment and harmony between personal knowing, social relations, and a living environment can emerge. And even more compelling, the possibility for what we describe as harmonized mutual development in a community of learners moves within reach. This paper explores the potential of a curricular and pedagogical design to produce a kind of collective ethic in learning that is often elusive in formal learning environments. 

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. 

Data literacy has taken a front seat in present day conversations on education reform primarily due to the need for education on disruptive technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and Internetof- Things that are rapidly transforming the future of work and life. School systems worldwide have already included data literacy several years ago in their curriculum, still the definition of data and the activities utilized to teach data handling are verily outdated and seek change to reflect the new relationship we are starting to form with data. This paper discusses a workshop conducted for data literacy education in schools. The hands-on activity based approach taken in the workshop seeks to offer a broad definition to data along the lines of real world application in terms of our human sensory perception of audition, vision, and haptics.