Make Beats, Learn Code, Promote Equity: Creative Coding for a Purpose

Purpose & objective

Using sound clips from top recording artists like Alicia Keys, Pharrell, and Khalid, this session will demonstrate how middle and high school students used code on Georgia Tech’s EarSketch platform to tell their own stories through music while competing for up to $5000 in prizes. This session will highlight the 2022 Your Voice is Power Competition and model how we integrated lyric analysis and song structure, social justice learning, and algorithmic thinking to create an authentic experience in both music and computer science. Participants will have the opportunity to experience the curriculum as a student and begin to code their own song in EarSketch, a free and accessible code-to-compose program developed at Georgia Tech. We will share the inspiring songs created by our 2022 competition students and highlight these student voices. We’ll also reveal what’s next for “Your Voice is Power,” a new bilingual curriculum and competition featuring Latinx artists and launching for National Hispanic Heritage Month in September 2022.Our lesson plans/activities are structured using project based learning pedagogy and we provide teachers - free, accessible, online lesson plans and PowerPoints. Participants will interact with the curriculum and EarSketch. They will "do the tasks" as well as "learn the pedagogy" behind Your Voice is Power. They will learn how to navigate and teach using the EarSketch in addition to how to integrate social justice and music in the CS classroom. Our prior research of EarSketch has demonstrated the power of music to authentically engage diverse student populations and to increase their intentions to persist in computing, especially among women and underrepresented minorities. Results from our 2021 Your Voice is Power evaluation show that students achieved high levels of awareness of the use of coding to promote equity, and high levels of feelings of empowerment and agency to use their knowledge to create change in their lives and/or school community. Additionally, students achieved understanding of computing applications and some confidence in their ability to succeed in computing and music technology.

Supporting research

Promoting intentions to persist in computing: an examination of six years of the EarSketch program DANA WANZER, TOM MCKLIN, JASON FREEMAN, BRIAN MAGERKO, TANEISHA LEE. - 2020Computer Science Education

Implementing EarSketch: Connecting Classroom Implementation to Student Outcomes TOM MCKLIN, DANA WANZER, TANEISHA LEE, BRIAN MAGERKO, DOUG EDWARDS, SABRINA GROSSMAN, JASON FREEMAN 2019
SIGCSE '19
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3287324.3287379

EarSketch: engaging broad populations in computing through music
JASON FREEMAN, BRIAN MAGERKO, DOUG EDWARDS, TOM MCKLIN, TANEISHA LEE, ROXANNE MOORE
2019
Communications of the ACM
https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2019/9/238972-earsketch/fulltext