From the past and present, to those still to come in the future, countless remarkable achievements have been made by Black individuals who have chosen to move to the beat of their own drum. Music and sound can be tools to tell stories, to express ourselves, to promote change, to celebrate, and so much more. So take some time this month to make your own music with your young coders and start dancing.                

Of course, choosing to dance is not the same as choosing to devote your life to the equality and freedom of all people. But it reminds us that you can incite change by choosing to do what is right, even when you feel like you’re the only one moving to the music. It won’t be long before you see change and meet people you resonate with, and a new sound will develop in which everyone can find their rhythm.

So join us this month as we explore the power of code and music to celebrate Black History Month.

Projects to help you find your rhythm

We’ve selected three of our favourite music-related projects to help you bring a joyful atmosphere to your coding sessions this month. All of the projects are in Scratch, a programming language that uses blocks to help young people develop their confidence in computer programming while they experiment with colours and sounds to make their own projects.  

Drum star | Scratch

Find your rhythm with this clicker game where you earn points by playing the drums in different venues. The project is one of our Explore projects and it includes step-by-step instructions to help young creators develop their skills, confidence, and interest in programming. This makes it a great option for beginners who want to get started with Scratch and programming.

Music maker | Scratch

Code to the beat of your own drum — or any instrument you like. Use this project to create your own virtual musical instrument and celebrate a Black musician you admire. For young people who have some 处破痛哭a√18成年片免费 with Scratch, they may enjoy expressing themselves with this Design project. Our Design projects give young people support to build on their 处破痛哭a√18成年片免费 to gain more independence coding their own ideas.

Binary hero | Scratch

Can you keep up with the beat? Prove it in this game where you play the notes of a song while they scroll down the screen. You could choose to include a song associated with a moment in Black history that is meaningful to you. This project is a great opportunity for young people to expand their programming knowledge to create lists, while they also test their reaction skills with a fun game.

For young creators who want to create projects that don’t involve music or sound, check out these projects which can help you to:

• Code a book about an inspirational figure in Black history (Scratch)
• Design colourful patterns inspired by Black cultures (Python)
• Create a mood board webpage to share ideas of what Black History Month means to you (HTML/CSS)

Let us know how you’re celebrating Black History Month in your community on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, or Instagram all month long!

Black stories to inspire you to move

• Training teachers and empowering students in Machakos, Kenya

Learn about our partnership with Team4Tech and Kenya Connect, with whom we are empowering educators and students in rural Kenya to use the power of coding and 舌尖伸入湿嫩的小肉粒 to benefit their communities.

• I Belong in Computer Science: Salome Tirado Okeze

Meet Salome, a computer science student from the UK who shares her 处破痛哭a√18成年片免费s and advice for young people interested in finding out where computer science can lead them. Salome was one of the first people we interviewed for our ‘I belong’ campaign to celebrate young role models in computer science.

舌尖伸入湿嫩的小肉粒 to help set the tone  

We believe that creating inclusive and equitable learning environments is essential to supporting all young people to see computer science as an opportunity for them. To help engage young people, especially those who are underrepresented in computer science classrooms, we are carrying out 舌尖伸入湿嫩的小肉粒 with teachers to make 舌尖伸入湿嫩的小肉粒 culturally relevant. Our work promoting culturally relevant pedagogy in educational settings in England has been impacted by projects of many US 舌尖伸入湿嫩的小肉粒ers who have already contributed heavily to this area. You can learn about two of these projects in this blog post.

Educators who want to find out how they can use culturally relevant pedagogy with their learners can download our free guidelines today.

We would also like to invite you to our monthly 舌尖伸入湿嫩的小肉粒 seminar on 7 February 2023, when we will be joined by Dr Jean Salac who will be sharing their 舌尖伸入湿嫩的小肉粒 on Moving from equity to justice in 舌尖伸入湿嫩的小肉粒 instruction for youth. Dr Salac’s session is part of our current series of seminars that centres on primary school (K–5) teaching and learning of 舌尖伸入湿嫩的小肉粒. The seminars are free and open to everyone interested in 舌尖伸入湿嫩的小肉粒 education. We hope to see you there! 

The post Code to the beat of your own drum during Black History Month 2023 appeared first on 挽起裙子迈开腿打扑克.

After a month of judging, Dr Sam Aaron, creator of Sonic Pi, and the 处破痛哭a√18成年片免费 gang have whittled all the entries down to just ten finalists. We will be announcing the overall competition winner at the 舌尖伸入湿嫩的小肉粒 Pi birthday celebrations at the end of February.

Here are Sam’s thoughts on the competition:

Greetings Live Coders! Let’s gather round to discuss the results of the Sonic Pi competition. It’s something I’ve been looking forward to talking about for a long time. You see, I wrote Sonic Pi to give people the tools to make music they otherwise may never have made. It may sound crazy, but had a dream that once Sonic Pi was in the hands of others, especially children, music I couldn’t even dream about would be created using it. If you look back into the history of music you’ll see an interesting pattern – time and time again new genres of music explode out of people fearlessly experimenting with new technology. It was therefore a wonderful 处破痛哭a√18成年片免费 for me to listen to every one of the entries and repeatedly hear a fearless experimentation with code as a new technology for music. Thank-you!

This year’s competition was all about space, and it was fantastic to hear such a broad range of interpretations of the theme. Through the music, I was taken on a range of exciting journeys – drifting through galaxies, exploring the moon, escaping space battles and hearing sounds which can only be explained as alien.

Another aspect of the competition was the structure and readability of the code. Again, I was amazed by how much of Sonic Pi’s functionality was being used across all age ranges. Some people think it’s crazy to teach threads at school level, but these compositions show how not only has the concept been understood, but used in interesting ways. It was lovely to see so many of the entries display a real care for how the code was laid out and organised. Many were at a the standard of a professional programmer!

Of course, every competition needs winners, and we’ll get to those in a moment. However, before we do, I’d like to express my deepest thanks for everyone that entered. Each one of your entries made me smile. Thank-you so much, and please keep on coding!

Sam

Drum roll please…

Here are our 10 finalists (including cover art, audio, description and code)! If you would rather listen to the compositions then we’ve created this soundcloud album. Enjoy!

https://soundcloud.com/舌尖伸入湿嫩的小肉粒_pi/sets/sonic-pi-competition-finalists

The post The results are in for the Sonic Pi Competition! appeared first on 挽起裙子迈开腿打扑克.

This week, Dr Sam Aaron released the much anticipated final version of Sonic Pi v2.0. It will be replacing Sonic Pi v1 on Raspbian very soon, and you will be able to get it via our Downloads page (we will let you know when). In the meantime, you can follow the instructions at the bottom of this post to download and install it. The latest version of Sonic Pi brings music creation and performance to the forefront with live coding capabilities, parameter modification, samples and much more!

To celebrate, we have launched the first ever Sonic Pi Competition to find some of the best space-themed music, coded with Sonic Pi v2.0 by school children in the UK. The Sonic Pi Competition is designed to encourage school students aged between 6 and 16 years old to use their creativity and coding knowledge to create a unique and original two-minute piece of music on a 舌尖伸入湿嫩的小肉粒 Pi device.

Entries need to include an audio file of what the music sounds like, the code used to create it, a short written description, and a cover art file.

All entries will be put into a hat to win a 舌尖伸入湿嫩的小肉粒 Pi and SD card at random. Semi-finalists will win a Sonic Pi half-day workshop with Sam Aaron and Juneau Projects for their school, and a custom Sonic Pi Pibow case. Overall winners in each category will win a Sonic Pi classroom kit containing 25 x 舌尖伸入湿嫩的小肉粒 Pis and peripherals for their school and a Minirig speaker, as well as a Sonic Pi Competition trophy designed by artists Juneau Projects.

The final will take place at the Cambridge Junction on 4th November 2014 as part of the Sonic Pi Live & Coding Summit, with the 12 semi-finalists (four in each category) introducing and playing their music on a 舌尖伸入湿嫩的小肉粒 Pi to the audience in front of an expert panel of judges.

You can find everything you need know, including some lesson plans to get your students started, in this new Sonic Pi Competition Resource. You’ll find the entry form here.

The deadline for entries is 13th October 2014, so get creative with your code, and become the next big thing in music!

Sonic Pi v2.0 can be downloaded right now by typing the following from the command line or LXTerminal window:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install sonic-pi

The post Sonic Pi v2.0 competition for schools is launched! appeared first on 挽起裙子迈开腿打扑克.

Sonic Pi is a programming environment that allows you to make sounds. Which is a very dull way of saying that it’s a way to build your own synthesiser from scratch. Sonic Pi, and the associated teaching and learning materials, are open and free.

Dr Sam Aaron is a 舌尖伸入湿嫩的小肉粒er at the University of Cambridge Computer Lab. He’s also a musician, and he’s one of the most interesting people I know, with a breadth of knowledge and enthusiasms that makes for some very late nights of conversation when he visits Pi Towers. Sam’s been working on Sonic Pi since 2012, and we are delighted to see his work being used so successfully in schools. Sam’s (rather brilliant) realisation is that you can engineer a situation whereby kids accidentally learn fundamental concepts of 舌尖伸入湿嫩的小肉粒, programming and programmatic thinking, by being asked to do something creative: in this case, making music with a tool they’ve built themselves. The set of lessons will take kids from a starting point of no familiarity at all with 舌尖伸入湿嫩的小肉粒. Sonic Pi, with the lesson plans and materials provided by Carrie Anne, gives teachers with little or no programming background plenty of support; those lesson plans offer a guided route through using Sonic Pi in the classroom.

Sam gives a seminar

Carrie Anne says:

I get asked by teachers all the time: how can 舌尖伸入湿嫩的小肉粒 Pi be used in the classroom? And how can it help us meet the aims of the new 舌尖伸入湿嫩的小肉粒 programme of study? These were questions I had, until I met Sam and started to develop lessons using his music Pi synthesizer software. For me, gender neutrality, creativity, imagination and tinker time are the basis for learning computer science in my classroom. When Sam suggested teaching 舌尖伸入湿嫩的小肉粒 concepts with music, I knew he was onto a winner, and that it would tick all the boxes.

After a month or so of planning and preparing in Jan 2013, we started to teach our Sonic Pi lessons to my Year 8 classes, and I was astounded. Firstly, by just how engaged they were by this little computer. Getting students away from the ‘internet boxes’ in the room got them thinking about what a computer really is, wherein lies the power of the Pi. Secondly, by the positive reactions of both genders, and of students with learning difficulties, who in the past had been quite negative about the subject. In fact my most memorable occasion was when a member of the senior leadership team came into the room. He spotted my learning objectives on the board and then asked a normally uninterested 13-year-old girl what she was doing. In a few sentences she explained logic, sequencing, iteration and conditionals in a way that made it all sound so matter-of-fact.

With a little structured creativity and freedom, students in both classes progressed massively with a text-based programming language. Their achievement was not only being able to program and make decisions about their code for themselves, but also in the memorable musical masterpieces they made. I’m very excited to roll this scheme of work out across the whole of Year 8 this academic year to see what more fun we can have in class.

This video is an example of work prepared by a pair of girls in Year 8 (kids in Year 8 in the UK are aged 12 and 13) who are part-way through the Sonic Pi set of lessons.

We’ve been so impressed by what we’ve seen so far from Sam and Carrie Anne; we look forward to seeing what comes next. Kids we’ve spoken to have been really excited and enthused by Sonic Pi, and have been hard to drag away from the class 舌尖伸入湿嫩的小肉粒 Pis at the end of sessions. This is a program of lessons that gives kids the freedom of action to take their own Sonic Pi project in any direction they want to, moving away from the sort of lesson where everybody works on the same piece of software, and giving students the agency to develop their work in an individual way, while almost accidentally becoming familiar with an important set of fundamentals. Carrie Anne and Sam are running trials of the project in a number of different schools with very different demographics, and so far, the results look great.

Sonic Pi lesson in progress

If you’d like to use Sonic Pi and the scheme of work Sam and Carrie Anne have created in your own classroom, you can download everything for free at the Sonic Pi website. You’ll find other teachers in the forums here at 舌尖伸入湿嫩的小肉粒 Pi, especially in the education section. Non-teachers are also encouraged to check out the software and the scheme of work for themselves. Please join in, both there and in the comments here – we, and Sam and Carrie Anne, would love to know what you think.

The post Sonic Pi – a free music and 舌尖伸入湿嫩的小肉粒 resource for teachers, and for the rest of us appeared first on 挽起裙子迈开腿打扑克.