Making Beautiful Coded Music with Kindergarteners: Connections with books, music, coding and MakeyMakey

 With my younger students I am working on making connections with books, what we are reading and connections to their lives as well as a way to make connections with technology and introducing new types of  technology. I have always loved the Makey/Makey piano. It is such a fun and exciting way to share the concept of physical computing and young students love it and are filled with such joy when they use it. This sparked an idea to connect books, physical computing, a real piano and some collaborative making!

We started out this three weeks long project with reading books that featured a piano. We read two picture books “The Bear and the Piano” by David Litchfield and “Khalinda and the Most Beautiful Song” by Amanda Moechel. Students made connections with similarities between the books, the characters and the role of music and the piano in each of the stories. We then talked about how a piano works. We read the nonfiction book “Musical Instruments” by Claude Delafosse. We also looked at pictures of a piano and talked about how the instrument works. Kindergarteners learned that when you press on a key that a hammer hits the string and makes the sound, the length of the string determines the note that the piano plays.

During our next class, we took a field trip to the public piano in the main lobby of the school. The piano is open and available for students to use during breaks and free time. Kindergarteners were able to see the keys, strings and hammers move and create the music and sounds. Each student was able to press the keys and see the hammers move to hit the strings. This hands-on experience helped them to see and better understand how the piano works.

Then we made connections with the idea of how when you touch the key it triggers the hammer to make the sound and the idea of physical computing. Students have lots of experience with Scratch Jr coding app, they learned how to code different characters to move in the program. With this project, I wanted to make deeper connections with the idea of connecting a physical object with code to make it do something. Students made connections with the instructions they give to the characters in Scratch. For example, add the green flag code block and a move forward code block, when the green flag is pressed the character moves forward one space.

After making the connections with the work they had already done, I introduced the  Makey/Makey, a circuit board that connects everyday objects to the computer keyboard. The Makey/Makey was connected to the plug and play piano app. The Makey/Makey connects to conductive materials that trigger code connected to the up, down, right, left and space bar on the computer. For example if you have an alligator clip connected to the up arrow, a user can press the alligator clip connected to the home key and the up arrow and that triggers the code to play the sound connected to the up arrow in the code.

During our next class together, students tested different objects and everyday items to figure out what was conductive. Fun things like fruit, vegetables and water are conductive but stuffed animals, books, and plastic toys are not. Students learned that metal is a conductive material including tinfoil. Now it was time to make their own conductive piano. KIndergarteners were put into groups of four and each group was given a long pieces of cardboard and a sheet of tinfoil, They were able to decorate their piano key anyway they wanted with paper, stickers, markers, tissue paper etc, making sure they had a tinfoil key as part of their design.

The final celebration was a whole class piano recital. Each group was set up with a computer, a MakeyMakey, their tinfoil piano keys were connected to the plug and play piano, and they each had a home key to complete the circuit. KIndergarteners made beautiful tinfoil, physical computing coded piano music! 

This project made many connections for kindergarten students. They made connections with the picture books they read and the real instrument that they see and use in school and at home. Kindergarteners also advanced their thinking and understanding about coding and how it works in an app but also the foundations of how it is used to make objects move and work. Students worked together in small groups to make fun, creative and unique pianos and then had a great time working together to make beautiful music!