Using music to engage students in an introductory undergraduate programming course for non-majors

EarSketch is a curriculum and learning environment designed to engage diverse student populations in introductory computing courses through an approach that connects coding and computational thinking with the composition, production, and remixing of popular music. Prior studies at the high school level have shown significant impacts on student engagement and intention to persist in computing, especially for female students. This paper describes an adaptation of EarSketch for use in an introductory undergraduate-level programming course for non-majors at an open-access four-year college. The paper describes a quasi-experimental study comparing student engagement, content knowledge, and intention to persist between course sections using EarSketch and non-EarSketch flavors of the curriculum, along with a path analysis exploring factors related to student engagement and intention to persist. The findings suggest that STEAM learning interventions such as EarSketch can significantly impact gains in student content knowledge, engagement, and intention to persist across diverse undergraduate student populations.