The Effect of Music Producing on Computational Thinking Among Primary School Students in Childcare: The 8th APSCE International Conference on Computational Thinking and STEM Education

Stimulating creativity can make an important contribution to computational thinking (CT) of elementary school students who attend childcare after school. Since learning goes beyond time spent in school, it makes sense to offer students in childcare-centres meaningful CT-activities that exceed more common applications of technology for CT development, like programmable robots or serious games. Such approaches provide, besides a focus on visual modality, promising opportunities emphasising auditory modality. Reasoning from such different contextual perspective, it’s interesting to explore whether self-creation of electronic music using music-producing software has an effect on CT-development, and what added value can be attributed to creativity. Therefore, an experimental mixed methods-study was conducted among elementary school students aged 10 to 13 within a childcare setting using FL Studio © music producing software. Quantitative data were obtained by pretest-post test-assessment administering the validated Computational Thinking test (CTt). Qualitative data were obtained conducting interviews and observations during and after each session asking questions to what magnitude students grasped CT sub-characteristics, to what extent creativity and creative thinking played a role, and what perceptions students themselves had in this regard. Our results indicate that applying music-making software has a significant effect on CT-development where the focus is on the invocation and utilisation of auditory modality. Remarkable effects could be identified on CT-(sub)characteristics ‘loops,’ ‘conditionals,’ ‘nesting,’ and required CT-tasks. Our study also found that technology enhanced music producing stimulates creativity, which appears an important parameter regarding CT-development. It is recommended to conduct further research on the intersection between CT and creativity using combinations of different modalities.