Hi @EarthToAbigail,
I find your idea very appealing. Also I do like the musical outcome. I did read into your blog entry but did not read the whole piece in detail. I must admit on first reading your post I had to chuckle because if you have watched a few of Sam’s presentations you will know that sorting algorithms is what he chooses as deterrent example when it comes to teaching programming 
But I admire that you take the bull by the horns and face the challenge to make especially sorting algorithms an interesting and rewarding subject. I like that and am looking foward to the next sequel.
As I am teaching Sonic Pi at the university once a year I also made some steps and thought about what could be interesting and how it could be taught in an intesting way. My approach started by identifying ‘musical problems/tasks’ (such as: how to organise musical patterns such as A-A-B-A) and how to solve these with coding and especially with Sonic Pi. Nevertheless my focus for that was/is to find easy and memorisable ways which can be part of ones live coding vocabulary. On the other hand I also wanted to focus on the musical side rather than exploring features of Sonic Pi and/or Ruby.
I haven’t worked on that in a while (but will continue to do so). The reason is, that right now I am into programming for the grid (Monome), which I can pursue more seriously since I am the proud owner of one.
The grid also provides some interesting ideas to combine music, programming and how to teach both. On example (which right now exceeds my abilities by far) is a sequencer based on Conway’s game of life.
Let me know what you think if you like and let us know about your next blog post of this series. I would also be interested in the feedback you’ll get by the ones that attend your courses.