This year I made the decision to switch my curriculum from Garageband which I have done for the past 3 years to Sonic Pi. I have only been learning to code from a little less than a year and only started working with Sonic Pi over the summer. But I recognize the power and possibilities that exist as well as the benefits to learning coding along with music, so I decided to just go for it and see what happens. My administration has been supportive of me taking risks, so I knew they would have my back (and quite frankly don’t really care that much about what I do).
Since this is a new experience for me and also a new platform that is starting to find footing in more schools around the world, I want to document my experience and share it with others. This forum seems like a good place to start. I’m not sure how things are going to progress, so I don’t know how I’ll format everything. I’ll try to post each week, although I am already 4 weeks in so I’ll be playing catch up for a little while and will probably get behind throughout the year. Sometimes it will be anecdotal, sometimes more about what I felt worked or didn’t work and how I could improve for the future.
I am teaching 3 sections so hopefully I can make some refinements in a given lesson by the time I teach it 3 times. I will share whatever resources I come up with. A lot of what I will do will be built around ways that I teach music, so they might not work for everyone. But I welcome questions, comments, insight, recommendations, constructive criticism etc. I have already found the Sonic Pi community to be very supportive and motivated, so I just want to feel like I can contribute to it.
This is wonderful - thank-you so much for pushing boundaries and taking risks.
I’m really looking forward to hearing about your adventures with Sonic Pi and I really want to do my best to take your experience and fold it back into Sonic Pi to improve things for everyone
You’re a Music teacher? How I wish the Music teachers at my school would show a passing interest in Sonic Pi and acknowledge the ways we could link up across the curriculum. Well done for being innovative - your pupils will benefit so much!
Yeah, I wish I had a CS teacher in my school to bounce some ideas off of as well. But I suppose that is what this forum is for. Maybe as my year progresses and I develop my curriculum more, you can share it with them so they can see the musical content that can be taught in conjunction with CS.
That would be awesome, thank you. Alas, the Music teachers at my school aren’t very open minded but one day someone might join the department who would be willing to try out something new and progressive in place of Garageband. I’m looking forward to your next posts.
@mrbombmusic, @perpglo - It’s awesome to see you both hook up with educators from a different subject here. I really hope Sonic Pi can help you both communicate with each other so you can share ideas and thoughts in ways which were perhaps much harder otherwise (due to factors such as linguistic or cultural barriers).
In other words, I’d love to see more musical ideas in CS and more CS in music. After all - teaching is a performance!
I’m looking forward to your next posts.