The main motivation for this activity is to get students working with TunePad in a way that feels personal and allows them to be creative while simultaneously introducing a connection between musical expression and coding. Through the MCC tool in TunePad, kids will get to make drum patterns without knowing any programming and have the corresponding TunePad code generated for them.

This activity is an alternative to the previous Module 1 activity. It utilizes Jam Session and MCC (Music-to-Code Convertor) features.

Activity Overview

1. Warm-up (~5-10 min)

2. Main Content (~15 min)

   • Remix Coded Beats MCC project and send students collaborative link (see Appendix)

   • Talk about parts of TunePad cell (~7 min)

     1. 1. Adding new cell

        2. Renaming cell

        3. Timeline/piano roll visualization

        4. Code area

        5. Note/Instrument area

        6. Play/Stop button vs global play button

   • Introduce MCC Activity (~7 min)

     1. 1. Activate record mode

        2. Click into cell instrument

        3. Coach plays super simple drum beat

        4. Copy/Paste generated code into code area

           1. Allude to the idea of functions: e.g. playNote and rest are both things called functions. Functions are a set of instructions for the computer.

        5. Play cell

3. MCC activity (~30 min)

   • Create new drums cells

   • Rename cell to include student name

   • Activate record and record a short beat

   • Copy/Paste generated code into code area

   • Play cell

4. Share (~5-10 min)

   • Coach can play each cell individually and have students reflect on what they made

   • Coach can play entire project all together

N.B. there’s some flex/buffer time to allow for introducing activities, login, and/or potential slowdowns. Take these timings as recommendations and use your own judgement

Activity Details

Warm-Up Discussion (~5-10 min)

To keep things engaging and relatable, you might start off by introducing this activity through a brief discussion of beats that people have heard in their favorite songs. You could even play snippets of a few songs that kids like and base the discussion around those tracks. Some questions you might want to ask are listed below.

• Strongly recommended: Greet them with enthusiasm, ask about their day, and then take one of the avenues below or whatever you feel is appropriate. Keep in mind that your energy rubs off on them

• Possible prompts listed below. The idea is to prime them to be thinking about making a beat using the tools they’re already familiar with (their mouth, hands, pens tapping on a table, whatever). The activity will essentially let them use knowledge of those “tools” to make a simple beat within TunePad

  • Has anyone made music before? Has anyone written a computer program before?

    • Leading to “don’t worry if you haven’t because we’re all going to do that today!”

  • Have you ever made a beat by tapping on a table, clapping, or beatboxing?

  • Who has heard We Will Rock You? Can anyone tap or clap out that beat?

• • • What kinds of songs do you like?

Instruction 0: Login to TunePad (~5 min)

Make sure everyone gets logged into their accounts and troubleshoot as needed. If an engaged student is having login issues, you might just wanna share your screen for the duration of the session and do the activity yourself for them to follow or choose to do it as one big group.

Instruction 1: Create new drum cells & add names (~5 min)

Have everyone create a drum cell and add their name to it. If it helps, demo this for the students on your screen and take time to go around and make sure people are able to do this.

Instruction 2: Recording a beat (~15 min)

At this point you should have demonstrated how to use MCC and should encourage students to do as you did. That is, have them click the record button and create a simple pattern by tapping the drum pad.

***HALFTIME: ~30 MIN MARK HERE***

Instruction 3: Testing out their pattern (~15 min)

After they’ve had a shot at recording a pattern, have them copy/paste the generated code into their cell and tell them to take a listen. If they hit play and like what they hear, great! Encourage them to share. If not, let them know that’s okay and that they can go back into record mode, click “clear” and try recording a pattern again and then copy/pasting the new code to see if they like the new pattern they make better than the original.

Instruction 4: Share & Reflect (~5-10 min)

Coaches should take the time to play through what students have made in their cells and/or have kids volunteer to share. If there’s time left in the session, coaches should ask the students what they thought of the session, if they had fun, what they found cool, and how they could make next time even more fun. Beware, the kids will troll you so try to focus on the constructive feedback they give you/the activity.

Troubleshooting

At this point, people have hopefully created their first beat in TunePad. However, some issues might still come up or might have come up before to prevent the completion of this milestone. These potential issues and their solutions are described below. Try to preface troubleshooting by reassuring people that glitches and bugs are a part of programming and are how you learn. Some analogies to sports or other domains might help here too (e.g. “If you play a sport and make a mistake, that helps you learn what to correct for next time”). Finally, if something comes up and you have no idea what to do, don’t hesitate to ask another coach for help.

NOTE: For this activity, most “bugs” will be of the login variety or with the pattern students make not sounding like they intended. For the former, let a dev team member (e.g. Mike, Cam, Amartya) know preferably via the Slack channel and for the latter encourage students to simply play around with recording new patterns until they get something that sounds more like what they intended.

• Issue: Logging into TunePad account problems

  • Check: Have them share screen and confirm that they are typing in the correct username and password

  • Workaround: If enough people can’t log in, have a coach share their screen and do the activity as a group on that person’s computer. Use the chat to vote on what genre and which patterns to use

• Issue: Green play button in library doesn’t play sounds

  • Solution: Have them refresh the page and keep trying to click that button to preview the sound until it works

• Issue: Beat sounds out of sync (e.g. drums and melody play at different speeds)

  • Check: Ensure that both the loops they’ve chosen are actually at the same speed (check sound names in library and look for the number before “bpm”)

  • Check: Ensure that the project BPM has been set to match the loops’ BPM

  • Check: If they did not use the +/- to set their project’s BPM and refreshed the page afterwards, the project automatically BPM got reset to 120 (just a TunePad bug) and if their loops are not at 120, things will sound off.

• Issue: Loops sound like they’re cutting off/not playing fully

  • Solution: Try testing different values in the second argument of the playSound function (i.e. different multiples of 4 like 8, 16, or 32). Have them try those different values and try playing that cell again to see if the loop properly...loops.

• Issue: Loop plays but then goes silent for a bit before looping again (variant of above)

  • Solution: Make sure that the second argument of playSound isn’t too big. For example, if they’ve typed in 16 but the loop is an 8 beat loop, it’ll play for 8 beats and be silent for the other 8. The fix in that example would be to change 16 to 8.

• Issue: “name ___ is not defined on line ___”

  • Check: Check that the spelling of the arguments to playNote is correct

  • Check: Check that any definitions or variables that are used in that line are spelled correctly and defined as needed in the code cell that should be at the top of the file

• Issue: “Error on line ___”

  • Check: They have typed the code correctly and they aren’t leaving any spaces/tabs between or before words in a function, misspelling words, writing in lowercase where they should be writing uppercase or vice versa. Check that code is on its own line (e.g. playNote is used once per line), nothing like “playNote(0) playNote(0)” in one line