Teaching computational thinking through musical live coding in scratch

This paper discusses our experience in teaching an interdisciplinary general education course called Sound Thinking that is offered jointly by our Dept. of Computer Science and Dept. of Music. It focuses on the student outcomes we try to achieve and the projects we use to help students realize those outcomes. It explains why we are moving from a web-based environment using HTML and JavaScript to Scratch and discusses the potential for Scratch’s “musical live coding” capability to reinforce those concepts even more strongly. Categories and Subject Descriptors K.3.2 [Computers and Education]: Computer and Information Science Education — computer science education, curriculum. General Terms Design, Languages Keywords Performamatics, Scratch, computer science education, interdisciplinary courses, musical live coding, generative music, curriculum design.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: SIGCSE
• Authors: Alex Ruthmann, Jesse M. Heines, Gena R. Greher, Paul Laidler, Charles Saulters II
• Keywords: Computer Science, Computer Science Education, Education, Musical Live Coding, SIGCSE 2010