This video is an introduction to EarSketch, an online environment for late elementary through college intro to Computer Science classes. EarSKetch will allow you to teach basic Python, JavaScript, and computing principles, in the context of an AP CSP class or in other situations. Students code to compose and remix music, in a free and online learning environment that contains a curriculum, a code editor, a Digital Audio Workstation, and a sound library. The samples in the library were composed by Jay Z's sound engineer Young Guru, and famous sound designer Richard Devine. The creativity and personalisation offered by Earsketch; in addition to the use of popular music styles such as dubstep and hip hop contribute to a great engagement from students.
Computer Science, Broadening Participation
Georgia Tech
STEM-C Partnerships: Computing Education for the 21st Century (STEM-CP: CE21), Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL), Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE)
Related Content for EarSketch: teaching coding through music
Great work! The late elementary to college level scope of your curriculum is impressive! Do you find that you scale the level of work/difficulty for different levels? For example - do you target the CSP connection/alignment more for the High Schoolers than the younger students? If so, do you need to adjust elements of the curriculum depending on grade level? Thanks!
Lea Ikkache
Lead Presenter
May 15, 2017 | 04:51 p.m.
Hi Amy, thanks for your comment! The curriculum is written for High School students but is also widely used in Middle Schools. We are currently evaluating our vocabulary level to adjust it for younger students as well. There is a block mode for very young students if you want to avoid syntax errors. As a teacher, you can also decide to skip some chapters that you find too complicated. Hope this helps, let me know if you have any more questions!
2
Discussion is closed. Upvoting is no longer available
Found helpful:
Kristina Lux
Amy Moreland
Neil Plotnick
Facilitator Teacher
May 15, 2017 | 06:27 p.m.
Does your software allow the user to import sounds from a microphone? I can well imagine some students wanted to sing or beat box with help from the computer. Other students may want to use their musical instruments to enhance the sounds they can produce. Does the software emulate a mixing board or tape loop machine?
Lea Ikkache
Lead Presenter
May 15, 2017 | 07:03 p.m.
Hi Neil, thanks for your questions! There is indeed a way for students to either record directly in EarSketch or upload their own sounds. There is no mixing board but you can code your volume effect for each track. For anything that regards loops we recommend using coding loops. Let me know if that answers your questions!
Vivian Guilfoy
Senior Advisor
May 15, 2017 | 08:08 p.m.
Very interesting way to make coding come to life for students. Do you have any documentation of student work showing the process they have gone through and the end result of their creation?
Lea Ikkache
Lead Presenter
May 15, 2017 | 08:51 p.m.
Hi Vivian, thanks for commenting on the video! We organized a competition this year, you can see the winners' songs on this page (both music and code): https://earsketch.gatech.edu/landing/#/competition. I hope this helps!
This project is so interesting- thanks for sharing. The competition results are great (I'm now a huge Gina Gomez fan), and I wonder if you studied how they were producing these songs? For example, do they seem to use what they are learning about coding to determine how to mix sounds, or is their understanding of music guiding their CS work?
Lea Ikkache
Lead Presenter
May 15, 2017 | 09:57 p.m.
Hi Deborah, I'm also a Gina Gomez fan, I must admit! I don't have information specifically about how they created their song, but you can have a look at the code (by clicking on yellow 'EarSketch link' button). Hopefully this will show what type of coding concepts they use. It is recommended in the curriculum to try to add sounds together and then modify the song depending on your preferences in an iterative process.
Nicole Reitz-Larsen
Facilitator Educator
May 17, 2017 | 11:13 a.m.
Hello Lea - this project looks like a very engaging platform for students to get hooked into computer science. It is important for students to see a variety of avenues that lead in and out of the computer science field. It is also very rewarding for students to see that creativity and personalization are key factors in this environment.
Do you have any suggested modules or shorter activities to give students a taste of the software and a few concepts? I can imagine showing this to my high school students and sharing some of the music listed in the competition section and my students wanting to try it out to see if it is really do-able.
What type of growth have you seen in your high school computer science courses as a result of making EarSketch available? Do students see a variety of career opportunities out there with the skills they've learned in EarSketch? One of my favorite videos I share from Made with Code to introduce the possibilities with computer scienc is - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOdkfOhUtjs.
In trying to get started in to the program, I see a lot of text for students to read through, how does your team present the curriculum in a way that doesn't make the learning seem to intimidating for reluctant learners?
What kind of support do you give to teachers who may want to try the curriculum, but need to align it to state CS standards or national standards?
1
Discussion is closed. Upvoting is no longer available
Found helpful:
Pati Ruiz
Lea Ikkache
Lead Presenter
May 17, 2017 | 08:14 p.m.
Hi Nicole, thank you for your comment and questions! - There are 2 activities I recommend for discovering EarSketch and coding: our Hour of Code tutorial (https://earsketch.gatech.edu/earsketch2/?curric...), and the engageCS activity (https://www.engage-csedu.org/find-resources/ear...) - I will let my fellow presenter Jason Freeman answer the question about research results. The overall results are that engagement in students who use EarSketch increases more with EarSketch (specifically the percieved importance of Computer Science). The increase in engagement is also more pronounced for female and minority students. - The curriculum contains indeed a lot of text. We are in the process of adding more videos. Two elements can help with reading: the curriculum contains a lot of examples so students can interact with the interface; and we added recently summaries for each section, for students who don't have time to read everything. - we have a facebookk group of teachers who can help with the discussion about standards. We also provide teacher materials with courses outlines, tests, slides, and tips. Hope this answers your questions, please don't hesitate to comment again if you need more information!
1
Discussion is closed. Upvoting is no longer available
Found helpful:
Pati Ruiz
Nicole Reitz-Larsen
Facilitator Educator
May 18, 2017 | 12:04 a.m.
Great that you have a teacher facebook group and teacher materials to help them gain confidence and support to teacher the curriculum.
Jason Freeman
Co-Presenter Professor
May 18, 2017 | 10:29 a.m.
To follow up on the original questions: re the research, this paper from ACM TOCE is a good summary of one study we've done on student engagement and intention to persist in computing: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2886418. In short, we're seeing statistically significant gains, with particularly strong gains for female students. We've seen similar results in more recent studies across multiple high school CS Principles classrooms and at the undergraduate level (publications on these newer studies is forthcoming).
Neil Plotnick
Facilitator Teacher
May 17, 2017 | 12:58 p.m.
I am wondering about the teachers who are using this tool. Are you seeing music teachers who are crossing over into CS or the other way around? I shared your project with some of the music faculty at my school and await to hear their feedback. One commented that the intersection of computers and music is critical for anyone interested in production, engineering and related fields.
Lea Ikkache
Lead Presenter
May 17, 2017 | 08:17 p.m.
Hi Neil, This is a very interesting question! Some music teachers use EarSketch in their classroom. The project was in fact born partly in the Music Technology department at Georgia Tech, where research is focused on creating tools for music composition, distribution, performance, and listening. Some Music Technology teachers also use EarSketch, as it examplifies well the intricacies between music and technology.
Aneshka Szczesny
Undergraduate Student
May 17, 2017 | 07:59 p.m.
Thank you for sharing your program! It's amazing that it can be used from elementary students to college students. Ear Sketch can cross the curriculum; I am wondering if you know if it is more often used by music teachers or computer science and technology teachers?
Lea Ikkache
Lead Presenter
May 17, 2017 | 08:19 p.m.
Hi Aneshka, thanks for your comment! Teacher material requests are mainly from computer science teachers, but we have an increasing number of music teachers interested as well.
Arthur Lopez
Computer Science Teacher
May 18, 2017 | 04:39 p.m.
This is VERY cool! My name is Art Lopez, and I am from San Diego, CA. I was one of the pilot teachers for AP Computer Science Principles course. One of my co-pilot colleagues, Eric Allata from New York, introduced me to EarSketch as he used it teach the AP CSP course. He really raved about it and its impact on his students! What really caught my attention in the video was the attraction of learning Computer Science for young women and ethnically diverse students. I teach in a school that is ethnically diverse and 90% of the student population is on free/reduced lunch programs. It is a first experience in computing for many of my students, and I find that using block languages really helps them understand Computer Science projects. What I would like to ask about is the block mode for using EarSketch; can the block mode be used to scaffold learning about CS for all age groups and levels when first using EarSketch, then migrate to the text based languages? I also concern myself with text based languages and syntax as that can be challenging, frustrating and disengaging for students who have little or no experience in computing. Thanks a lot, and, again, what a great project to teach students CS via music!
1
Discussion is closed. Upvoting is no longer available
Found helpful:
Neil Plotnick
Jason Freeman
Co-Presenter Professor
May 18, 2017 | 09:18 p.m.
Arthur: our blocks programming mode is based on droplet, the same editor behind pencilcode and code.org's app lab. We like it because even though it's a blocks editor, you're still editing real Python or JavaScript code, and you can go back and forth between blocks and text (in both directions) whenever you like. Thus, it is a natural progression for students to start in the blocks mode and progress to the text editor as they grow more comfortable with the language.
Neil Plotnick
Facilitator Teacher
May 18, 2017 | 10:50 p.m.
I had the pleasure of meeting David Bau at Google offices in Cambridge when I was taking my ECS training a few years ago. I too like the transition between a text and block based language. My own High School students strongly desired to stay with Python and stop doing any development with Scratch. The transition was indeed surprisingly smooth when I made it.
Really interesting concept. I wish this was around when I was a youth studying music on a daily basis!! In what ways might different cultural music be applied (e.g. powwow music for tribal students)?
miigwech/thank you - April
Lien Diaz
Facilitator Sr. Director
May 19, 2017 | 03:36 p.m.
I was fortunate to observe students work with Earsketch in a high school CSP classroom and was thrilled to see how much they enjoyed using it. More over, students were making connections with important programming concepts as they described different components of the music they had created. It was novel and exciting! Just a few questions: Are there ways the project is working to expand implementation, especially in schools with diverse and large minority student populations? Does the project have data on participation among women and other URM groups in CS that can be shared with the community? It would great to see this project continue to grow and flourish in more schools. So wonderful to see the many successes of this project!
Jason Freeman
Co-Presenter Professor
May 20, 2017 | 07:28 a.m.
Here in Georgia, we're partnering with a number of school districts to bring EarSketch to CSP classes in a large variety of high schools (for next academic year, we'll be working with ~25 high schools). Part of our research, in fact, uses systems dynamic modeling to try to better understand what factors influence the success of EarSketch across different schools.
Here is a recent paper on an early pilot study looking at student engagement across gender and URMs: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2886418. Look for more publications in the next year on our work in CSP classes across a much larger number of schools.
Such a cool project! I am wondering if you are doing any longitudinal research on students who are introduced to coding with EarSketch. Curious to know about how likely they are to pursue further classes in HS or college in CS/engineering-type fields (i.e. does that post interest/engagement translate to longer term learning). Great work. I am watching this with my 9-year old and she is clamoring to download EarSketch immediately!
Jason Freeman
Co-Presenter Professor
May 20, 2017 | 07:29 a.m.
We measure intent to persist through a student engagement survey and are in the early stages of collecting some data on actual persistence (e.g. through future student course selections). Look for some results to be shared in publication soon!
Lea Ikkache
Dear participants, welcome!
We are really excited to present EarSketch at this showcase. Please write in your comments:
- if you are using EarSketch, or planning to use EarSketch, and if so in what context
- if you have any questions about implementing EarSketch in your classrooms,
- if you would like to participate to the discussion about the future of EarSketch.
Thank you for watching the video!
Kristina Lux
Amy Moreland
Great work! The late elementary to college level scope of your curriculum is impressive! Do you find that you scale the level of work/difficulty for different levels? For example - do you target the CSP connection/alignment more for the High Schoolers than the younger students? If so, do you need to adjust elements of the curriculum depending on grade level? Thanks!
Lea Ikkache
Hi Amy, thanks for your comment! The curriculum is written for High School students but is also widely used in Middle Schools. We are currently evaluating our vocabulary level to adjust it for younger students as well. There is a block mode for very young students if you want to avoid syntax errors. As a teacher, you can also decide to skip some chapters that you find too complicated. Hope this helps, let me know if you have any more questions!
Kristina Lux
Amy Moreland
Neil Plotnick
Teacher
Does your software allow the user to import sounds from a microphone? I can well imagine some students wanted to sing or beat box with help from the computer. Other students may want to use their musical instruments to enhance the sounds they can produce. Does the software emulate a mixing board or tape loop machine?
Lea Ikkache
Hi Neil, thanks for your questions! There is indeed a way for students to either record directly in EarSketch or upload their own sounds. There is no mixing board but you can code your volume effect for each track. For anything that regards loops we recommend using coding loops. Let me know if that answers your questions!
Vivian Guilfoy
Very interesting way to make coding come to life for students. Do you have any documentation of student work showing the process they have gone through and the end result of their creation?
Lea Ikkache
Hi Vivian, thanks for commenting on the video! We organized a competition this year, you can see the winners' songs on this page (both music and code): https://earsketch.gatech.edu/landing/#/competition. I hope this helps!
Deborah Silvis
This project is so interesting- thanks for sharing. The competition results are great (I'm now a huge Gina Gomez fan), and I wonder if you studied how they were producing these songs? For example, do they seem to use what they are learning about coding to determine how to mix sounds, or is their understanding of music guiding their CS work?
Lea Ikkache
Hi Deborah, I'm also a Gina Gomez fan, I must admit! I don't have information specifically about how they created their song, but you can have a look at the code (by clicking on yellow 'EarSketch link' button). Hopefully this will show what type of coding concepts they use. It is recommended in the curriculum to try to add sounds together and then modify the song depending on your preferences in an iterative process.
Nicole Reitz-Larsen
Educator
Hello Lea - this project looks like a very engaging platform for students to get hooked into computer science. It is important for students to see a variety of avenues that lead in and out of the computer science field. It is also very rewarding for students to see that creativity and personalization are key factors in this environment.
Do you have any suggested modules or shorter activities to give students a taste of the software and a few concepts? I can imagine showing this to my high school students and sharing some of the music listed in the competition section and my students wanting to try it out to see if it is really do-able.
What type of growth have you seen in your high school computer science courses as a result of making EarSketch available? Do students see a variety of career opportunities out there with the skills they've learned in EarSketch? One of my favorite videos I share from Made with Code to introduce the possibilities with computer scienc is - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOdkfOhUtjs.
In trying to get started in to the program, I see a lot of text for students to read through, how does your team present the curriculum in a way that doesn't make the learning seem to intimidating for reluctant learners?
What kind of support do you give to teachers who may want to try the curriculum, but need to align it to state CS standards or national standards?
Pati Ruiz
Lea Ikkache
Hi Nicole, thank you for your comment and questions!
- There are 2 activities I recommend for discovering EarSketch and coding: our Hour of Code tutorial (https://earsketch.gatech.edu/earsketch2/?curric...), and the engageCS activity (https://www.engage-csedu.org/find-resources/ear...)
- I will let my fellow presenter Jason Freeman answer the question about research results. The overall results are that engagement in students who use EarSketch increases more with EarSketch (specifically the percieved importance of Computer Science). The increase in engagement is also more pronounced for female and minority students.
- The curriculum contains indeed a lot of text. We are in the process of adding more videos. Two elements can help with reading: the curriculum contains a lot of examples so students can interact with the interface; and we added recently summaries for each section, for students who don't have time to read everything.
- we have a facebookk group of teachers who can help with the discussion about standards. We also provide teacher materials with courses outlines, tests, slides, and tips.
Hope this answers your questions, please don't hesitate to comment again if you need more information!
Pati Ruiz
Nicole Reitz-Larsen
Educator
Great that you have a teacher facebook group and teacher materials to help them gain confidence and support to teacher the curriculum.
Jason Freeman
Professor
To follow up on the original questions: re the research, this paper from ACM TOCE is a good summary of one study we've done on student engagement and intention to persist in computing: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2886418. In short, we're seeing statistically significant gains, with particularly strong gains for female students. We've seen similar results in more recent studies across multiple high school CS Principles classrooms and at the undergraduate level (publications on these newer studies is forthcoming).
Neil Plotnick
Teacher
I am wondering about the teachers who are using this tool. Are you seeing music teachers who are crossing over into CS or the other way around? I shared your project with some of the music faculty at my school and await to hear their feedback. One commented that the intersection of computers and music is critical for anyone interested in production, engineering and related fields.
Lea Ikkache
Hi Neil,
This is a very interesting question! Some music teachers use EarSketch in their classroom. The project was in fact born partly in the Music Technology department at Georgia Tech, where research is focused on creating tools for music composition, distribution, performance, and listening. Some Music Technology teachers also use EarSketch, as it examplifies well the intricacies between music and technology.
Aneshka Szczesny
Thank you for sharing your program! It's amazing that it can be used from elementary students to college students. Ear Sketch can cross the curriculum; I am wondering if you know if it is more often used by music teachers or computer science and technology teachers?
Lea Ikkache
Hi Aneshka, thanks for your comment! Teacher material requests are mainly from computer science teachers, but we have an increasing number of music teachers interested as well.
Arthur Lopez
This is VERY cool! My name is Art Lopez, and I am from San Diego, CA. I was one of the pilot teachers for AP Computer Science Principles course. One of my co-pilot colleagues, Eric Allata from New York, introduced me to EarSketch as he used it teach the AP CSP course. He really raved about it and its impact on his students! What really caught my attention in the video was the attraction of learning Computer Science for young women and ethnically diverse students. I teach in a school that is ethnically diverse and 90% of the student population is on free/reduced lunch programs. It is a first experience in computing for many of my students, and I find that using block languages really helps them understand Computer Science projects. What I would like to ask about is the block mode for using EarSketch; can the block mode be used to scaffold learning about CS for all age groups and levels when first using EarSketch, then migrate to the text based languages? I also concern myself with text based languages and syntax as that can be challenging, frustrating and disengaging for students who have little or no experience in computing. Thanks a lot, and, again, what a great project to teach students CS via music!
Neil Plotnick
Jason Freeman
Professor
Arthur: our blocks programming mode is based on droplet, the same editor behind pencilcode and code.org's app lab. We like it because even though it's a blocks editor, you're still editing real Python or JavaScript code, and you can go back and forth between blocks and text (in both directions) whenever you like. Thus, it is a natural progression for students to start in the blocks mode and progress to the text editor as they grow more comfortable with the language.
Neil Plotnick
Teacher
I had the pleasure of meeting David Bau at Google offices in Cambridge when I was taking my ECS training a few years ago. I too like the transition between a text and block based language. My own High School students strongly desired to stay with Python and stop doing any development with Scratch. The transition was indeed surprisingly smooth when I made it.
April Lindala
Really interesting concept. I wish this was around when I was a youth studying music on a daily basis!! In what ways might different cultural music be applied (e.g. powwow music for tribal students)?
miigwech/thank you - April
Lien Diaz
Sr. Director
I was fortunate to observe students work with Earsketch in a high school CSP classroom and was thrilled to see how much they enjoyed using it. More over, students were making connections with important programming concepts as they described different components of the music they had created. It was novel and exciting! Just a few questions: Are there ways the project is working to expand implementation, especially in schools with diverse and large minority student populations? Does the project have data on participation among women and other URM groups in CS that can be shared with the community? It would great to see this project continue to grow and flourish in more schools. So wonderful to see the many successes of this project!
Jason Freeman
Professor
Here in Georgia, we're partnering with a number of school districts to bring EarSketch to CSP classes in a large variety of high schools (for next academic year, we'll be working with ~25 high schools). Part of our research, in fact, uses systems dynamic modeling to try to better understand what factors influence the success of EarSketch across different schools.
Here is a recent paper on an early pilot study looking at student engagement across gender and URMs: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2886418. Look for more publications in the next year on our work in CSP classes across a much larger number of schools.
Caitlin Martin
Such a cool project! I am wondering if you are doing any longitudinal research on students who are introduced to coding with EarSketch. Curious to know about how likely they are to pursue further classes in HS or college in CS/engineering-type fields (i.e. does that post interest/engagement translate to longer term learning). Great work. I am watching this with my 9-year old and she is clamoring to download EarSketch immediately!
Jason Freeman
Professor
We measure intent to persist through a student engagement survey and are in the early stages of collecting some data on actual persistence (e.g. through future student course selections). Look for some results to be shared in publication soon!
Laura Farrelly
Are you mapping to CSTA standards now as well? I really like the tie between music and coding - nice work!
Jason Freeman
Professor
Only CSP for now because that's the focus of our current research, but would definitely like to add alignment to CSTA in the future!
Further posting is closed as the event has ended.