Learning Recursion from Music and Music from Recursion

Recursion is a fundamental concept in several courses in computer science but is often one of the most confusing concepts for beginners. On the other hand, music is universal and appeals to most people. This paper is a novel attempt to understand and utilize the synergy between music and computer science to teach recursion to freshman students. The paper presents the retrograde strategy and collaboration techniques used during the composition of music and explains how these ideas can be used to learn recursion and stack data structure. We taught recursion to 30 first year undergraduate students in computer science using the normal approach and then demonstrated the control flow using the retrograde strategy. We found that around 81.2% preferred correlation with music. We see this as an initial step towards a deeper correlation of composing music and composing code.

I. Introduction

The correlation between music composition and code composition is not new [1]. Coding has been linked with many other domains as well. A synergy between two domains often makes it easier to understand the other if we have knowledge of one [1]. Overmars et al. and Mariana et al. present an approach to teach computer science using game design and a digital game in their papers [2], [3] respectively. Other studies that bring out synergy between computer science and other domains include study between agents and data mining [4], web service technologies and simulation [5], and between medical informatics and bio-informatics [6]. The retrograde strategy that we will be talking about in this paper has been applied in the medical domain. We present in this paper one such synergy between computer science and music.