Abstract:

Computing is fundamentally transforming every aspect of our lives, and there is a growing consensus that Computer Science (CS) is a 21st century skill that all students should be exposed to. Nonetheless, CS is often considered dry, difficult, and unappealing to historically underrepresented students. For example, women tend to find CS topics more meaningful when connected to cultural issues and other disciplines [Margolis & Fisher, 2003]. It is therefore important to present CS from a variety of perspectives [Khan & Luxton-Reilly, 2016] and to make connections to other subjects [Margolis & Fisher, 2003].

Previously, we developed NetsBlox, a browser-based visual programming environment, which presents distributed coding primitives as intuitive and easy-to-grasp visual abstractions, capturing the essence of important concepts while hiding unnecessary complexity [Brady et al 2022]. This tool provides access to many online data services including Google Maps, the Online Movie Database, NOAA climate change data, etc. Message passing allows students to create social programs like multiplayer games or chat rooms. We found that these abstractions and contemporary topics are the key to making CS more engaging and relevant to students’ lives.

In this work, we focus on perhaps the most broadly appealing topic of all: music. We recently developed BeatBlox, a music-based framework for teaching CS, as an extension to NetsBlox. By connecting CS concepts to a subject already of interest to people across diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, the learning process becomes fun, engaging, and accessible. To ensure that students see themselves represented in the tool, we engaged in a series of co-design sessions with secondary students and educators to accurately address their prevailing pain points.

These sessions made it clear that our content must speak to a wide variety of cultures to make the tool accessible to students of all backgrounds. This resulted in features allowing students to access audio clips from different musical genres, interact with multiple virtual instruments, and choose among options for creating music, from programming individual notes to combining existing clips. Students also desired to utilize music as the basis for other types of projects, which led to functionality for generating cross-disciplinary projects. A student might tap into their artistic side to implement a graphic visualizer or bypass music altogether and implement a sound effect-based project, like simulating the sound of a passing ambulance. By integrating access to external devices, BeatBlox allows students to record real instrumental music, or for students with no access to an instrument, they can compose with nothing more than their laptop and a piece of paper using “augmented reality” instruments like an air guitar or paper drums.

Finally, BeatBlox addresses an unfortunate trend of young learners increasingly dealing with social isolationism by fostering connection through collaborative coding and allowing synchronized execution of student programs across multiple computers, relying on NetsBlox’s unique networking capabilities. This allows teachers to create immersive class projects such as a digital orchestra, where every student works to implement their own part of an overall musical composition. Thanks to its diverse set of functionality, BeatBlox provides an extremely wide range of appeal to students, regardless of their backgrounds or musical abilities.

Keywords:

Computer science education, music, block-based programming, distributed computing, interdisciplinary engagement.