Evanston/Skokie School District 65 fifth graders danced, sang and coded at the second annual BitCrush showcase at Chute Middle School Saturday.
Hosted by Northwestern’s Tangible Interaction Design and Learning Laboratory, the event consisted of a showcase and live coding competition for students to share music and coding projects created with TunePad or MusicLOGO 2.0.
SESP Prof. Michael Horn, the director of the TIDAL Lab, said volunteers from NU taught students the software during computer science classes across District 65 schools throughout Winter Quarter.
“I love working with the kids,” Cameron Roberts, a third-year Ph.D. candidate in learning sciences and computer science, said. “They’re really funny. I’m always impressed with their performances or ideas.”
Both TunePad and MusicLOGO 2.0 allow students to create digital music with Python code, Roberts said. He added that TunePad was developed by the TIDAL Lab.
Fifth grader Jeffery Kreuser, who participated in the showcase, said he was inspired by his dog to create a project featuring a rapidly accelerating musical arrangement.
“At the beginning it’s mild — they’re getting excited because they want to play — and then it goes higher because they’re doing zoomies, which they go fast and also get very excited,” Kreuser said.
For the competition, students were judged based on entertainment, musicality, creativity, technical ability and live coding. Participating teams were assigned a student coach from NU, and the top three received a 3D-printed BitCrush trophy.
Roberts, who was also a coach, said he has worked with his team since January and found it rewarding. He added that helping students accomplish their end goal was “really just amazing.”
Fifth graders and third-place winners Maeve Apostu and Mila Wegrzyn created a stop-motion video in which they made a rainbow with playdough. Wegrzyn said the idea came from “thinking of happy things.”
“We were just brainstorming happy things and we thought of rainbows,” she said.
Fifth grader and first-place winner August Ilseman said he used the Desmos Graphing Calculator to simulate a black hole for his music project titled “Phonk.”
He said he was inspired by the music subgenre Phonk, a combination of hip-hop and electronic beats, and he incorporated synthesizer melodies commonly used in the genre to make the project sound “spacey and impactful.”
Fifth grader Zinnea Lyonsmith choreographed a dance to go along with her digital music project “Roller Coaster Adrenalina.” She said she enjoyed learning the music software in class because she could gain technical skills and also impact others.
“I can code a robot, but I can also code things to bring people together,” she said.
Correction: A previous version of this story misspelled the names of August Ilseman and Mila Wegrzyn. The Daily regrets these errors.
Email: [email protected]
Related Stories:
— TIDAL Lab creates new computer science learning technologies
— llinois advances cell phone ban in schools
— Evanston parents share disappointment in D65’s iPad purchase
