Coding and Music!? How one club brought Sonic Pi into their program!

This post is written by Code Club Volunteer Rowena Stewart who volunteers at Maroubra Library. Rowena has volunteered with Code Club for two years and is a Software Engineer at Industrie&Co

For the six sessions of our Term 3 course, Chau and I turned the Code Clubbers at Lionel Bowen Library, Maroubra into coding composers through a program called Sonic Pi.

Sonic Pi is a music synthesiser program developed by UK researcher Sam Aaron and designed for classroom use.

We had a group of 15 students ranging from years 4 to 8 with an even mix of boys and girls. Throughout the course, our students created some amazing sounds starting off with a simple doorbell, some cool drum beats, and even making their own version of the Tetris theme which they added into a remixed Scratch version of the game.

We were first introduced to Sonic Pi at the Code Club Advanced Teacher Training event and we enjoyed it so much we knew we had to teach it the next term. The teaching experience of this course was different to Scratch and Python, it’s very simple to get started and there is lots to explore! At the start of each lesson, the kids were eager to put their headphones on and try out all the available sounds to find the perfect addition to their musical piece. The only chatter we heard was “Can you help me with this?” or “Can you have a listen to the music I made?”

Although students and tutors both had different levels of musical skill and background we were all able to learn and share this with each other. We also learnt something new about digital music representation. For example, how the notes C, D, E, F, G, A, B can be represented by the MIDI values of 60, 62, 64 and so on.

It was great seeing the kids have so much fun and I would encourage other Code Club facilitators to consider Sonic Pi as a possibility for their advanced students!

Check out how you can start a Club and start creating your very own musical code here!