Engaging K-12 Students with Flow-Based Music Programming: An Experience Report on Its Impact on Teaching and Learning

Music and computer science (CS) have profound historical and structural connections, with programming music offering a promising avenue for engaging children in CS through creative expression. To foster this engagement, our team developed M-Flow, a flow-based music programming platform designed to introduce students to CS via music. Despite extensive existing research in music and CS education, experience reports and empirical studies on K-12 teachers' implementation and its impact on young kids' learning are limited. Therefore, we recruit elementary school teachers and students with no or limited prior programming experience, introducing them to M-Flow and its curriculum through a professional development workshop, a semester's job embedded support, and classroom implementation. We describe the experiences of teachers as they attempt to integrate music and CS, the challenges they face, and the influence on students' attitudes toward learning computing concepts. Specifically, we reflect on our intervention by conducting a sequential mixed-method evaluation. During the qualitative phase, we collected multiple sources of data from three teachers through focus groups and debriefings after a semester of classroom implementation. Thematic analysis of workshop activities, interviews, and debrief videos revealed three themes with seven sub-themes on teachers' integration of flow-based music programming and two themes with five sub-themes on challenges faced by the teachers. In the quantitative phase, we gathered data on attitudes and self-efficacy from 75 students taught by these teachers. Results indicate that the flow-based music programming environment provided an engaging programming experience for students and significantly increased their self-efficacy towards learning programming.