Impressive project! This is at the nexus of science and arts. These are the projects that blur the distinguishing lines between arts and science. This is excellent! I voted!!

Situating computational thinking in the context of music and the visual arts is a very innovative idea. One person in the video expressed the idea that “language is the barrier.” Could you say more about what aspects of your approach most likely reduced that barrier

Thanks for sharing your video that celebrates some of the achievements of middle school students engaged in the project. I would love to learn more about some of the specific projects that students presented at "The Big Reveal" as they used weather data to integrate computational thinking in music and visual arts. What did students create, how did they share it at The Big Reveal, and what were potential impacts of this project on students?

Thanks for asking, Jessica.

In a nutshell: The Big Reveal was the culmination of an artist-in-residency by a highly accomplished artist (Nathalie Miebach; https://nathaliemiebach.com/). Nathalie constructed quite large woven canoes (~ 5 feet long) with the assistance of one of ECU students in the Jenkins Fine Arts Center. She then went with my colleagues and I to deliver a canoe to each of the visual arts schools and encourage the students to "load" the canoes with artistic products that emanated from their recent experience of a major hurricane and historic flooding in the region. Nathalie showed the students at the music school how to construct a graphic score to record their experience. The students were charged as part of the loading of their canoe/graphic score construction to research and incorporate meteorological data on the progression of the hurricane and the subsequent flooding. This was an engrossing project that incorporated the concepts and approaches that constituted our definition of computational thinking in addition to prompting the students to collectively process their experiences.

After Nathalie introduced the students to the concept, they worked on this project for two weeks and then the students from all three schools and many parents and ECU faculty gathered at ECU to listen to the students discuss and display their projects and (in the case of the school that was focused on music) to listen to their graphic scores being interpreted by ECU music and dance students. The canoes and graphical scores went on display in one of the art galleries at ECU before being returned to the schools.

Undoubtedly one of the high points of the grant! 

Great project! I love how you included the voices of students in the video. Also, you incorporated a lot of different technology into their work, including Merge Cube. I've been curious about using Merge Cube. Can you say a bit about what the learning curve was like for students?

I love the concepts. We are developing a programming language for making music that leverages the similarities between CS and music. I'd love to hear your advice and perhaps collaborate for spreading our program. My contact is vminces@ucsd.edu

Thanks! 

Thank you for sharing your project. This is a very exciting integration of science, arts, and engineering. Can you say more about how you are measuring the impact of the project?

Great question, Nancy. The teachers' intuitions were very important to us, the students were highly engaged in the activities (time-on-task; see my editorial on Ronnie's response above), and I included a clip in the video of one parent's perspective of the worth of the project.

As for formal assessment of students' learning, this was a challenge that we wrestled with from the outset. What we soon found out was that the existing assessment instruments were oriented to either a particular computer programming language (coding) or environment or a particular implementation. I argued against assessing students' products for "alignment to" or "conformity with" with an exemplar since (a) our definition of computational thinking focused on concepts and approaches (see Barefoot: https://www.barefootcomputing.org/resources/com...) and (b) it seemed quite discordant with the nature of an inherently creative endeavor. 

Our approach was to invite students to share their concepts through participation in focus groups and their approaches through indicating the extent to which they employed each of the five approaches described in the definition of computational thinking (tinkering, creating, debugging, persevering, and collaboration) by placing a check on labelled continua.