Super Sonic Coding: Dekalb county students learn how to program with a beat

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joshua.smith@design.gatech.edu

Georgia Tech School of Music

840 McMillan Street

Atlanta GA 30332-0456

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Summaries

Summary Sentence:

Dekalb county students learn how to program with Earsketch.

Full Summary:

The Dekalb county school district has partnered with Earsketch, a program developed at Georgia Tech that is designed to combine programming and music. The school district has embraced the program, using it in all of their computer science programs and are even hosting a district competition for students to show off their compositions.

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  • Students using Earsketch Students using Earsketch
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Earsketch, a program designed to merge programming with composing music, was recently featured in We Are DCSD, a magazine published by the Dekalb County School District. The article discusses how many computer science classes in the district are catching code fever in no small part thanks to the program.

Developed by Jason Freeman and Brian Magerko, Earsketch allows students to learn to code in either Python or Javascript while manipulating loops, composing beats, and applying sound effects.

Alicia Harvey, a teacher at Martin Luther King Jr. high school, explains the appeal of the program to students succinctly. “Music is a natural gateway to learning,” she says. “I think that’s true mainly because it just feels good. Music is a language we all speak, in many genres.”

The Dekalb county school district continues to partner with Earsketch, even going so far as to host their own competition for students to show off their Earsketch creations. Ralph Jones, one of the students from the winning school, Stephenson High School, explained how much the competition - and the program itself - means to him and his team.

“We won because we cared about what we were supposed to be learning,” Jones says.
“This was more than just another assignment.”

To learn more, you can request a copy of the We are DCSD magazine here.

Additional Information

Groups

School of Music

Categories
Music and Music Technology
Related Core Research Areas
People and Technology
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Keywords
EarSketch, GT School of Music, Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology
Status
  • Created By: Joshua Smith
  • Workflow Status: Published
  • Created On: Feb 1, 2018 - 3:02pm
  • Last Updated: Feb 1, 2018 - 3:08pm