Broadening participation in computer science has been widely studied, creating many different techniques to attract, motivate, and engage students. A common meta-strategy is to use an outside domain as a hook, using the concepts in that domain to teach computer science. These domains are selected to interest the student, but students often lack a strong background in these domains. Therefore, a strategy designed to increase students' interest, motivation, and engagement could actually create more barriers for students, who now are faced with learning two new topics. To reduce this potential barrier in the domain of music, this paper presents the use of automated, immediate feedback during programming activities at a summer camp that uses music to teach foundational programming concepts. The feedback guides students musically, correcting notes that are out-of-key or rhythmic phrases that are too long or short, allowing students to focus their learning on the computer science concepts. This paper compares the correctness of students that received automated feedback with students that did not, which shows the effectiveness of the feedback. Follow up focus groups with students confirmed this quantitative data, with students claiming that the feedback was not only useful but that the activities would be much more challenging without the feedback.

The demand for qualified computing professionals is high, with thousands of positions remaining unfilled each year. To create more qualified professionals, initiatives to attract and engage students in computer science have been proposed, but they tend to concentrate on primary, secondary (K-12), and post-secondary (college) level. With many adults looking for better career opportunities, it is surprising that few computer science initiatives focus on attracting adult learners to the field. This paper presents the results of an informal computer programming course that teaches the foundational concepts of computer programming to adults as they program hip-hop beats. This course is designed to attract adult learners that otherwise might have never considered computer programming, building their confidence and skills. We conducted this course online, two nights a week, for five weeks, for about 40 participants. Afterward, we conducted a qualitative analysis of written survey data. We found that the adult learners' perception of computer programming changed during the course, with many participants planning their next step in computing education.

One way to broaden participation in computer science is to use a different approach to teach its foundational concepts, which can attract those not already interested in this field. This research aims to design and implement a curriculum that uses hip hop to teach computer programming, ultimately broadening participation in computer science.

Researchers and practitioners have demonstrated various benefits of introducing computational thinking (CT) through music composition coding. While researchers have studied the impacts on participant attitudes towards CT and their learning of CT concepts, more case studies are needed on both learning CT concepts as well as CT practices, i.e., the processes of constructing music coding projects. This paper presents a case study of middle schoolers in an informal learning environment focused on integrating music composition with coding in TunePad. Specifically, we collected and analyzed logs of coding events, final code products, and surveys to explore both CT concept use and CT practices exhibited by the participants as they completed open-ended music coding activities to create their own melodies with specific music and CT requirements and recommendations.

In spite of the efforts to provide computer science education for all, the percentage of Black and Latino Americans entering the computer science (CS) field has been stagnant for years. In an effort to attract and engage students many summer camps and after-school clubs use robotics, video-games, and even IoT devices, but these approaches seem to only attract those already considering STEM careers, a population low in Black and Latino students. To attract Black and Latino students to computer science a promising approach is to engage with their culture, making CS relevant to them personally. To this end, we present an approach that teaches middle school students to program using hip hop beats, intentionally leveraging a genre of music that appeals to a wide array of urban youth of color. This approach, called Code Beats, uses extensive scaffolding to support beginning students, authentic-sounding beats to engage students, and a expressive programming environment to support creative freedom. We present the results of our pilot camp, where students clearly showed an increase in computing enjoyment, confidence, belonging, and persistence. By the end of this course, all students were able to create their own, original beat from scratch, suggesting their progression to the Create phase of the Use-Modify-Create framework.