Hello, I'm Reinald

Hi There,

I stumbled over sonic pi recently, and found it an interesting project. First I got it downloaded on my windows PC, then in finally got my “pisound” board installed on one of my raspis, and checked that it is running on the Pi. Now I need to update it, as there is a Version 2.2 included in in the distro.

I’m an amateur musician for all of my life, my primary instrument is the electric bass guitar, but recently I got a bit more into electronic music, started soldering DIY synths, fiddling around with axoloti and bela platform, and now the sonic pi on the pi with pisound is my latest toy to find out, what nowadays DIY tools can produce.

Since I’m an agile coach for a living, I will check the ressources about using sonic pi in education for coding, since I am curious if I could use some of the things to create a learning experience that helps understanding some fundamentals of agile practices.

cheers,
Reinald

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Welcome @Reinald,

I do a lot with Sonic Pi in education here.

Since I’m an agile coach for a living, I will check the resources about using sonic pi in education for coding, since I am curious if I could use some of the things to create a learning experience that helps understanding some fundamentals of agile practices.

Could you explain a bit more about this as I am unfamiliar with what an “Agile coach” does or what “fundamentals of agile practice” are, so I’m curious how that would tie in with education and Sonic Pi.

I’m also interested to hear about what you do with bela platform as I have one as well and haven’t had a chance to do much with it.

Happy New Year!

Hello mate.

Welcome to the Forums,

Eli…

Hi @mrbombmusic ,

i will try to explain what an agile coach is, and what it is with agile practices as good as I can in a few sentences. A short history first:

Quite some time ago (I think in the mid 90th) it became more and more clear, that the approach in the software industry regarding the way they work and the way projects are organised was having a high failure rate. So alternate models have been explored (XP - extreme programming http://www.extremeprogramming.org/ ) for example, and lead to the agile manifesto: http://agilemanifesto.org/. With the agile manifesto as a background, many agile methods have been developed, for use in software development in particular, but more and more with product development over all. Scrum and Kanban might be the most popular frameworks, with probably 50 or 100 more beeing less known.

With the new methods came new roles into organisations, for example a “product owner” and a “scrum master” instead of “project managers”, with new definitions. The agile coach is another one.
As an agile coach I help development teams (on a small scale) and organisations / companies (on a large scale) to transform their culture, habits, communication, development and coding practices, processes, tools and a lot more things, to be able to use agile methods. And this includes a lot of training and learning, to give all those folks a chance to experience what this new work environment that I try to introduce might be like:

A team focused approach, continous learning and feedback cycles, an increasing level of self organisation within the teams, and a lot more.

“Agile practices” are details used in the sofware industry, that help getting better / closer to the agile principles, i.e. using test driven development or continous integration systems. It is still sometimes a surprise how far behind many enterprises are, even though one would consider software companies as “top technology”, but many of them seem to be stuck in the 80th with an introduction of PRINCE2 framework and no update ever since.

There are various tools used frequently by me and my colleagues to create a learning experience supporting this, i.e. building stuff in teams with lego bricks, group excercises, other game like elements. Using Lego is a “no brainer”, since there is nothing you need to learn about how to use it, you can immediately focus on “producing” something. So you can create a learning module short as 90 minutes for example, to experience some paricular aspect of an agile practice, for example.
Including some more techie things includes usually a lot more learning about the tool, so usually the focus tends to be distracted for the learning objectives to tool usage/mastery, what I try to avoid.
Sonic PI seems to be easy enough to use it even in smaller learning modules, and might be an interesting option including something that is closer to “real” programming nevertheless, since I often have a feedback in terms of “yes, it’s like that with the lego game, but with software development it is totally different”, i.e. the transfer seems to be difficult for some folks.

sorry about the lengthy post :-), I tried to explain. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask.

cheers, and happy new year,
Reinald

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Hi Reinald,

welcome to the Sonic Pi community :slight_smile:

I think you’ll find quite a lot of similarity with the live-coded fast-feedback aspects of Sonic Pi (necessary for both education and musical performances) and the core principles behind agile and XP programming. I look forward to hearing about how you might use it in upcoming workshops as a perhaps more ‘realistic’ tool for creating interventions with the learning outcomes you’re aiming for.

Have fun!

Thank you for explaining. I found this very interesting. There are definitely aspects of this which seem to apply to education in general eg team focused approach, continuous learning and feedback cycles.

since there is nothing you need to learn about how to use it, you can immediately focus on “producing” something.

This is, as I’m sure you’ve already recognized, is definitely a perk of Sonic Pi as there is a very low bar for entry (as Sam always says) so you can start producing very quickly.

Including some more techie things includes usually a lot more learning about the tool, so usually the focus tends to be distracted for the learning objectives to tool usage/mastery, what I try to avoid.

This is something I also struggle with as a music teacher. When introducing new concepts, there is a certain level of understanding within the programming side that needs to be addressed before mastering the music concept. (You can check out my documented struggles with this in my posts in the educators section.)

I’m very interested to hear about ways you incorporate Sonic Pi into what you do for trainings. I am happy to share ideas as well.

Hello All,
thank you so much for the warm welcome. In the last years I got more and more the impression, that a successful and friendly community is so much more important for the success of a software/hardware platform than technological superiority. And your welcome here gives me a good feeling, that this might be successful as well.

I will keep reading and keep you posted on my ideas and experiments, and developing learing modules using sonic pi in the context of agile software development.
cheers,
Reinald

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