Abstract:

There is widespread agreement today that teaching programming principles to the present generation of ‘digital natives’ who has to function in a digitized world in which technology evolves rapidly, creating new fields of study, new forms of employment, requiring new skills and abilities, should be preceded to early grades of school and even to preschool learning. Learning programming structures and principles enhances problem solving abilities, analytic thinking abilities, creative thinking and computer literacy. However, learning programming is perceived to be a difficult task due to the strict rules a programmer should obey and the rigidity character of programming commands. Following Seymour Papert (1980) vision that young children will be engaged in playful programming exploration, in this study, a series of unit lessons were designed for teaching programming via music. A group of twenty students (seven and eight graders) participated in the study in which the Scratch environment was used. Via the programming of well-known melodies, they learned programming concepts and structures such as variables, methods, repetition and conditional commands, parallel processes and recursion. The learning units were designed applying the spiral principle of learning in which each concept or issue is revisited in a higher level than the previous time it was introduced. The learning units include exploration tasks on which the students had to work individually. By the end of each session, there was a class discussion, led by the researcher, in which the new learnt concepts were summarized and the insights gained by the students during their own explorations were shared.

The aim of the study is to explore affective aspects of learning as well as the students' self-perception as regards to their ability to cope with programming. The data resources were pre and post attitude questionnaires, outcomes of the students' exploration tasks and transcripts of reflective journal taken by the researcher.

Analysis of the data revealed the following:
(A) the students were enthusiastic about using music to learn the basics of programming. This enthusiasm was expressed in the sound of joyful voices heard during the lessons.
(B) To improve the music performances their curiosity about the programming structures that can be used for that matter was aroused. For example, to produce a piano melody that is played with two hands (parallel processes), or playing a certain melody in different octaves (using variables) and more.
(C) During the days, between two class meetings, the students sent the researcher emails in which the code of additional melodies were included. This indicates that the practice of music programming was very enjoyable for them.

Keywords:

Affect aspects of learning, music programming, programming fundamentals, spiral learning.