Girls, Music and Computer Science

In this Innovative Practice paper we describe our experience on using an updated methodology based on the paper “Music Education Meets Computer Science and Engineering” with a focus on pre-university female students. The main differences from this work are: (1) We taught the girls how to program and how to play the music instruments in parallel, having two classes per week, one for each subject instead of weekly meetings; (2) We started the project by using some of the games and puzzles from lightbot.com and code.org and then move to the Greenfoot Initial Learning Environment; (3) We asked the students to survey some music games related to their music instrument and design three potential games that they would like to develop using the music instruments; (4) They had to present and pitch the projects they designed to the undergraduate and graduate students of our computer music technology laboratory. Given the time constrains of the project, we had to help them to select the most feasible idea; (5) We applied a questionnaire to capture the perception of the students at the end of the project. It should be noted that all students successfully developed their music-based games using the digital music instruments and the Greenfoot Initial Learning Environment. In total four games were developed: (1) A game that allows drummers to perform ear training where they list to a particular drumming sequence and must replicate the sequence; (2) A game that allows guitar players to practice the execution of musical scales; (3) A game that allows keyboard players to practice their sight reading based on the simultaneous of two or more notes at the same time; (4) A game that allows bass players to practice their sight reading. It should be noted that by participating in the project one of the students acquired the skills and confidence to join the school and church bands.