Fostering Computational Thinking in Primary School through a LEGO®-based Music Notation

Abstract

This paper presents a teaching methodology mixing elements from the domains of music and informatics as a key enabling to expose primary school pupils to basic aspects of computational thinking. This methodology is organized in two phases exploiting LEGO® bricks respectively as a physical tool and as a metaphor in order to let participants discover a simple notation encoding several basic concepts of the classical musical notation. The related activities, grounded on active learning theory, challenge groups of students to solve musical encoding problems of increasing difficulty.