This paper discusses our ongoing experiences in developing an interdisciplinary general education course called Sound Thinking that is offered jointly by our Dept. of Computer Science and Dept. of Music. It focuses on the student outcomes we are trying to achieve and the projects we are using to help students realize those outcomes. It explains why we are moving from a web-based environment using HTML and JavaScript to Scratch and discusses the potential for Scratch's "musical live coding" capability to reinforce those concepts even more strongly.
T HE AUTHOR CREATED A NUMBER OF WEB SITES to enhance traditional classroom instruction in computer science courses. These Web sites included lecture notes, assignments, downloadable programs, links to sites related to the course subject matter, and a program allowing students to see their grades on all assignments and tests and thus determine exactly where they stood in the course at any time.This study reports on two types of data analyzed to gain insight into students' use of the site: responses to an author-created survey and students' final grades. Students demonstrated strong positive reactions to the course Web site on the survey and showed statistically significant final grade improvement after the Web site was introduced. While these results should be interpreted conservatively due to the large number of uncontrolled variables that affect student performance, they are nonetheless encouraging enough to warrant continued effort to develop and evaluate course Web sites.
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