STEAM Activities Bridging Programming and Music

In this paper, we highlight the connection and mutual relationship between programming concepts (sequence of commands, parallel processes, loops, branching, subroutines) and musical composition concepts (notation in the score, chords, repetition, volta brackets, chorus). These bridges between programming and music have great potential to enhance and enliven programming education, as well as to foster inquiry skills and creativity in students. In this paper, we present sets of ideas for STEAM activities for various types of music programming projects — projects practicing and linking programming with musical concepts, projects aimed at exploring and developing musical abilities, and projects developing performance skills and compositional creativity. Furthermore, we describe our experiences and findings from implementing selected STEAM activities within the context of pre-service and continuous education of computer science teachers and informal education for primary and secondary school students under the EU CodeWeek initiative. The implementation of these STEAM activities in collaborative cloud-based development environments, such as Scratch, also allows for the integration of knowledge from programming and music education, the development of students' teamwork skills, and potentially those of their teachers, while providing them with a rewarding experience of creative work and presenting their musical artifacts to a wide audience.