This lesson builds on last week’s lesson, concentrating on the beats parameter of playNote. Students should begin to see how different beats values can be combined to form a simple drum beat. Students will begin to map rhythms that they can hear and clap out into working TunePad code. The goal of this activity is to have students learn about different note types and write some simple drum pattern code. In future activities, we will talk about how drum beats are typically constructed and how the various constituent instruments of a drumkit interact with one another.

Learning Goals

After completing this activity, students should feel relatively comfortable:

• Understanding what beats and bars are and how they relate to one another

• Identifying and understanding the different beat values used in conjunction with the playNote function

• Writing simple playNote statements with note and beats parameters

Activity Overview

1. Warm-Up Discussion (~5-10 min)

   • Ask about their day, transition to the warm-up discussion outlined below

2. Main content - beats values activity (~20min)

   • From first cell, all the way to Puzzle Instructions cell

3. Activity - beats values activity (~15min)

   • From Puzzle Instructions to the end

4. Share (~5-10 min)

   • Give them a quick recap and then share with them a link to this TunePad Project, which contains instructions for a challenge activity

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

Below is the TunePad project that has all of the content for this week (this could be copy and pasted in the chat for students to easily access):

• beats activities: https://tunepad.club/project/29045

Activity Details

Warm-Up Discussion (~5-10 min)

The motivation for this activity is to help build intuition about beats and rhythm values and how that maps to code. To that end, try to ground discussions in whatever is relatable for the students in your group. A few ideas are provided below but feel free to come up with your own variations on the same theme. Try to discuss beats and bars in the context of a discussion like one of the 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. Some potential ways to start off:

  • You could start off the discussion asking questions like: “When you guys listen to a song, do you ever tap along or bob your head?” This might help them to begin building the intuition of what a beat is. Another idea could be to listen to a quick snippet (no more than ~1 min) of a song like Stayin’ Alive by the Bee Gees or a song of their choosing and literally have people tap along or bob their heads to the beat.

  • Try to think of the beat to one of your favorite songs. What elements do you hear in it? Can you tap along to the pulse? Could even play someone’s favorite song and use that as an example to discuss.

Presentation

*OPTIONAL* (~3 min)

If your group has not been exposed to what a variable is or how playNote works at a high level, make sure you review slides 3-7 from last week’s presentation so that you feel comfortable giving them a very quick rundown of what variables are and what playNote does. If you really don’t have the time to do that, then see the suggestions below:

• Variable: “A word you can use like a bucket to hold onto values. After you give it a value, a variable will hold onto it and give it back to you whenever you type the variable name.”

• playNote: “This is what we type to tell TunePad to make a sound. It’s in the name. If we want to play a note, we use playNote! We tell it which sound to use and how long we want it to play that sound.”

Instruction 0: Login to TunePad (~5 min)

Make sure everyone gets logged into their accounts and troubleshoot as needed. If a 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 along or choose to do it entirely as one big group.

Instruction 1: Introduce beats values section of activity (~5 min)

Send the students the link to the activity and give them a brief overview of what it is. Have them remix the project. You'll likely want to reiterate what beats and bars (aka measures) are from the activity introduction. To communicate what a bar is, for now it will suffice to just say that 4 beats equals 1 bar after you explain and discuss what a beat is.

Instruction 2: Begin beats values section (~10 min)

Tell the students to start working through the activity and playing the various cells. Be sure to check in as needed to answer any questions and to confirm that people are able to access the activity and play each of the cells. An example of a check in could be, “Who learned what a quarter note is now? Raise your hand or type a 1 in the chat.” You could also do the activity as a group.

• Other prompts: What happens when the beats value number increases? How about when it decreases? How do the beats values numbers seem to be related? Do you notice any patterns?

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

Instruction 3: Introduce puzzle instructions section (~5 min)

Once the students have worked through the beats values activity and have gotten a flavor of the different kinds of note values out there, tell them to move on to the beats puzzle further down in the TunePad project. Give them an overview by mentioning that they’ll have to use the playNote function in conjunction with the note values they learned about earlier in the TunePad project to fill 2 bars. Each puzzle cell will contain specific instructions on which note value they need to use to fill the bars.

Instruction 4: Begin puzzle instructions section(~15 min)

There will only be three puzzles to work through so you might want to do this as a group. It's okay if you don't complete all three puzzles, but try to get through the first two! Otherwise, let students work and chime in every few minutes to ask if anyone got the first puzzle, then the second.

Instruction 5: Wrap up puzzle instructions section (~5 min)

Encourage people to quickly share if they got the puzzles or take the time to share your screen and give them the answers, briefly talking through things.

Instruction 6: Sharing & Challenge Activity (~5-10 min)

Start off by asking if anybody wants to share any TunePad project. If nobody responds (probably the most likely scenario), then share a cool project of your own or one from the cool projects doc. If you use something from the doc, make sure you fully understand it and credit the artist if it’s not your own project. After you take a few minutes to go over a cool project, send them the link to the optional creative challenge activity for the week and give them a very brief overview of that.

Troubleshooting

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

  • Check: Check that the spelling of the argument 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: “Unable to import ___”

  • Check: That they renamed their code cell at the top to “beats” and used from beats import * at the beginning of their drum cells

• Issue: “bad input on line __”

  • Check: if line is last line of cell, playNote is likely missing closing parenthesis

  • Check: otherwise, arguments to playNote could be missing comma in between

• Issue: “Error on line ___”

  • Check: They have copied the code exactly 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

• Issue: Clicking play on the cell but no sound

  • Check: Make sure the number entered inside “playNote” is a valid number (i.e. it corresponds to one of the TunePad drum sounds)

  • Solution: Refresh the page and try again.

• 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