Using Music to Foster Engagement in Introductory Computing Courses

The importance of imaginative assignments and innovative curriculum design in computer science (CS) education has been researched for some time now. In this poster, the authors discuss an interdisciplinary K12 informal education course called Computational Thinking in Music. The goal is to engage students in computer science by prioritizing personal expression, creativity, and aesthetics. The research includes a creative curriculum based on modeling theory of evidence-based pedagogical research, and an empirical one: by the time of the SIGCSE Symposium, the authors expect to have comparative results for control courses, where active learning curriculum was not used at all, as well as for the course with active learning curriculum. The Computational Thinking in Music course intends to broaden the number of individuals, particularly from underrepresented groups, who show interest and persist in the field of computer science through the use of student's intrinsic interests. Specifically, this study built an authentic STEAM learning environment through the use of EarSketch (https://earsketch.gatech.edu/landing) and Scratch (https://scratch.mit.edu/) two creative computing programs. The poster will display our findings in a creative fashion convenient for drawing informative conclusions. Two measures are used in assessing the effectiveness of creative curriculum: student scores on typical assessment instruments and student perceptions on Likert scales. Thus far the data are remarkably consistent over the various settings and indicates that participants of this camp benefitted more from an authentic learning environment allowing for music, creativity, and imagination than from a more traditional computing camp without the addition of musical concepts.