Incorporating music into an introductory college level programming course for non-majors

Abstract

STEAM-based courses are increasingly becoming popular in introductory programming courses but not many of these efforts focus on non-major undergraduate students and less is known about its effectiveness with career-bound students at the collegiate level. This paper describes our results and the lessons learned in teaching and implementing an EarSketch based introductory programming course for non-majors. EarSketch is a computational music learning platform that has been used successfully at the high-school level to introduce students to programming. We have adapted the EarSketch curriculum to satisfy the requirements of an undergraduate level introductory programming course. We have deployed the curriculum at Georgia Gwinnett College starting in Spring 2016 with the goal of observing improvements in content knowledge and attitudes towards computing. We have observed statistically significant improvements in the sections using EarSketch. Although more data is required to confirm our results, we argue that the EarSketch based curriculum engages students positively in the field of computing.