Using Domain-Specific, Immediate Feedback to Support Students Learning Computer Programming to Make Music

Abstract

Broadening participation in computer science has been widely studied, creating many different techniques to attract, motivate, and engage students. A common meta-strategy is to use an outside domain as a hook, using the concepts in that domain to teach computer science. These domains are selected to interest the student, but students often lack a strong background in these domains. Therefore, a strategy designed to increase students' interest, motivation, and engagement could actually create more barriers for students, who now are faced with learning two new topics. To reduce this potential barrier in the domain of music, this paper presents the use of automated, immediate feedback during programming activities at a summer camp that uses music to teach foundational programming concepts. The feedback guides students musically, correcting notes that are out-of-key or rhythmic phrases that are too long or short, allowing students to focus their learning on the computer science concepts. This paper compares the correctness of students that received automated feedback with students that did not, which shows the effectiveness of the feedback. Follow up focus groups with students confirmed this quantitative data, with students claiming that the feedback was not only useful but that the activities would be much more challenging without the feedback.