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Sonification Blocks: A Block-Based Programming Environment For Embodied Data Sonification

Published: 27 June 2017 Publication History

Abstract

High school students often struggle to find the motivation to learn to program. Music can be a powerful motivator for these students, but existing tools that combine music production with programming often fail to meaningfully engage students with core computer science concepts. Sonification Blocks was created to shift the focus back toward big ideas in programming. Sonification Blocks is a programming language for data sonification, the process of creating audio algorithms and controlling them with streams of data. Its implementation as a block-based language with clear, interactive data visualizers allows high-school-aged learners to develop computational literacy. Furthermore, the act of manipulating sound parameters with data streams that are controlled through body motion may help connect learners with powerful ideas in programming and data science.

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Joel C. Adams and Andrew R. Webster. 2012. What do students learn about programming from game, music video, and storytelling projects?. In Proceedings of the 43rd SIGCSE Technical Symposium. 643--648.
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Paulo Blikstein. 2015. Computationally Enhanced Toolkits for Children: Historical Review and a Framework for Future Design. Foundations and Trends in Human-Computer Interaction 9, 1 (2015), 1--68.
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Sayamindu Dasgupta and Benjamin M. Hill. 2017. Scratch Community Blocks: Supporting Children as Data Scientists. Preprint, arXiv:1702.00112 (2017).
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Google Developers. 2017. Blockly. (8 March 2017). Retrieved from https://developers.google.com/blockly/.
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Jason Freeman, Brian Magerko, Tom McKlin, and others. 2014. Engaging underrepresented groups in high school introductory computing through computational remixing with EarSketch. In Proceedings of the 45th SIGCSE Technical Symposium. 85--90.
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Mark Guzdial and Elliot Soloway. 2002. Teaching the Nintendo generation to program. Commun. ACM 45, 4 (2002), 17--21.
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Mozilla Developers Network. 2017. Web Audio API. (8 March 2017). Retrieved from https://developer.mozilla. org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Audio_API.
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Benjamin R. Shapiro, Annie Kelly, Matthew Ahrens, and Rebecca Fiebrink. 2016. BlockyTalky: A Physical and Distributed Computer Music Toolkit for Kids. In Proceedings of the 2016 International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME16).
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Cited By

View all
  • (2023)“Let the Volcano Erupt!”: Designing Sonification to Make Oceanography Accessible for Blind and Low Vision Students in Museum EnvironmentProceedings of the 25th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility10.1145/3597638.3614482(1-6)Online publication date: 22-Oct-2023
  • (2023)Programming Representations: Uncovering the Process of Constructing Data Visualizations in a Block-based Programming EnvironmentProceedings of the 2023 Symposium on Learning, Design and Technology10.1145/3594781.3594783(11-20)Online publication date: 23-Jun-2023
  • (2023)M-flow: a Flow-based Music Creation Platform Improves Underrepresented Children’s Attitudes toward Computer ProgrammingProceedings of the 22nd Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference10.1145/3585088.3589383(233-238)Online publication date: 19-Jun-2023
  • Show More Cited By

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  1. Sonification Blocks: A Block-Based Programming Environment For Embodied Data Sonification

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      IDC '17: Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Interaction Design and Children
      June 2017
      808 pages
      ISBN:9781450349215
      DOI:10.1145/3078072
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      Published: 27 June 2017

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      Author Tags

      1. computer science education
      2. constructionism
      3. embodied cognition
      4. music
      5. sonification

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      IDC '17
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      IDC '17: Interaction Design and Children
      June 27 - 30, 2017
      California, Stanford, USA

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      IDC '17 Paper Acceptance Rate 25 of 118 submissions, 21%;
      Overall Acceptance Rate 172 of 578 submissions, 30%

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      IDC '25
      Interaction Design and Children
      June 23 - 26, 2025
      Reykjavik , Iceland

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      Cited By

      View all
      • (2023)“Let the Volcano Erupt!”: Designing Sonification to Make Oceanography Accessible for Blind and Low Vision Students in Museum EnvironmentProceedings of the 25th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility10.1145/3597638.3614482(1-6)Online publication date: 22-Oct-2023
      • (2023)Programming Representations: Uncovering the Process of Constructing Data Visualizations in a Block-based Programming EnvironmentProceedings of the 2023 Symposium on Learning, Design and Technology10.1145/3594781.3594783(11-20)Online publication date: 23-Jun-2023
      • (2023)M-flow: a Flow-based Music Creation Platform Improves Underrepresented Children’s Attitudes toward Computer ProgrammingProceedings of the 22nd Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference10.1145/3585088.3589383(233-238)Online publication date: 19-Jun-2023
      • (2023)LITI: Learning with Interactive Time Series Information2023 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC)10.1109/VL-HCC57772.2023.00049(266-268)Online publication date: 3-Oct-2023
      • (2022)PSST: Enabling Blind or Visually Impaired Developers to Author Sonifications of Streaming Sensor DataProceedings of the 35th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology10.1145/3526113.3545700(1-13)Online publication date: 29-Oct-2022
      • (2021)Getting grammars into shape for block-based editorsProceedings of the 14th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Software Language Engineering10.1145/3486608.3486908(83-98)Online publication date: 17-Oct-2021
      • (2020)Block-based syntax from context-free grammarsProceedings of the 13th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Software Language Engineering10.1145/3426425.3426948(283-295)Online publication date: 16-Nov-2020
      • (2020)TIP-Toy: a tactile, open-source computational toolkit to support learning across visual abilitiesProceedings of the 22nd International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility10.1145/3373625.3417005(1-14)Online publication date: 26-Oct-2020

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