Students combine Technology, Literature and Art to Make Beautiful Music

During this past school year senior kindergarteners have been learning about coding and programming using the MakeyMakey, Scratch and coding robots. As the school year is coming to a close I wanted to do a combined hands on project that connected with coding, maker, art and literature.

We started with reading the book Drum Dream Girl by Margarita Engle and illustrated by Rafael Lopez. The book is inspired by the childhood of Millo Castro Zaldarriage, a Chinese-African-Cuban girl who broke Cuba’s traditional taboo against female drummers. The book is beautiful, the illustrations are gorgeous and the text is wonderful and the story is a great. Kindergarteners made connections with the rhythms and sounds in the poetry of the text and the vibrant colorful art of the images. We also had a great conversations about equity between boys and girls.

Next, we recorded audio of sounds of different drums. Students explored different types of drum sounds and picked the ones that they liked the best. Then we created the Scratch coding. Scratch is a drag and drop coding program that kindergarten students have been using this year.

The next step was to make connections with the MakeyMakey. We connected alligator clips to the buttons we coded on the Scratch code. Then I hammered nails into Crayola markers. The alligator clips were connected to the nails. The MakeyMakey needs a home or earth connection that triggers the Scratch coding to work. We connected the earth key to a piece of paper and then sprayed the paper with water to make it conductive making musical markers! When students started drawing on the paper the drums sounds started playing! Kindergarten students had so much fun with this STEAM project!