Adding teaching features to music blocks.

[Nirali0029]

To the extent I have understood Music blocks, it is used for practicing music, creating new music and so on. In my view point MB is a music tool that helps to create music. Also, for others, it is a programming tool.

What if we extend the functionality of Music blocks for teaching students? There are many remote parts of the world where internet is available but they cannot learn music due to the lack of proper guidance. Music is not only for entertainment but it helps to heal people also. So, to the extent I have analyzed for sugar labs, its motto is to spread education. In today's world, due to various situations, the cases of depression are also increasing among people.

There are many potential mentors who use music blocks for teaching music to students. So what if with the help of these potential mentors, we can provide some basic teachings of music to the students using music blocks as a platform?
Please give your opinion @walterbender @meganindya and also the community members.

[meganindya]

Any specific ideas? :)

[Nirali0029]

The basic idea which is in my mind right now is like mentors while taking their regular classes make a video of their lectures. The students can access the video and watch it at their own pace and also do activities done during the video lectures. Then, on the platform of music blocks we can add number of activities in accordance with the lectures so that the students can make out how much they have learnt. The activities may be designed with the help and suggestions of mentor.

As for now, I am thinking of having activities like giving output of the music blocks as an input to the assignment as students need to make the blocks according to the song. Like for example: There was a project for Christmas song during Christmas Eve. The entire tune is given to the students without displaying them the blocks making them. Then once they make the tune, we can show how much their made tune matches with the original tune, With some basic criteria qualified, they can access the next video lecture.

Here, the most important role to make this happen is for the mentors. So, what will mentors get out of all this?
We can have a rating column for the mentors (for a same project, various mentors can have videos uploaded), and the mentors with maximum ratings will be displayed on the website of MB or sugarlabs and if the board permits we can also plan to give then some goodies, This will attract and motivate the mentors more to give quality videos. Also, mentors will get some recognition like on github, we display the new contributors for the project.

Students are getting benefitted as they can learn music with just logging in the website. We may need to have a database for storing the details of students and their progress.

This is what my basic idea is up till now.

[walterbender]

I am not sure focusing on videos is necessarily the right thing to do, but I suppose that is what people do in the TikTok era. But sharing lesson plans in general (and remixing lesson plans) would be good. And a way to embed code snippets into lesson plans as well might be interesting. Having written many, it is a bit tedious with the current tooling we have.

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On Wed, Feb 3, 2021 at 7:13 AM Nirali Sanghvi ***@***.***> wrote: The basic idea which is in my mind right now is like mentors while taking their regular classes make a video of their lectures. The students can access the video and watch it at their own pace and also do activities done during the video lectures. Then, on the platform of music blocks we can add number of activities in accordance with the lectures so that the students can make out how much they have learnt. The activities may be designed with the help and suggestions of mentor. As for now, I am thinking of having activities like giving output of the music blocks as an input to the assignment as students need to make the blocks according to the song. Like for example: There was a project for Christmas song during Christmas Eve. The entire tune is given to the students without displaying them the blocks making them. Then once they make the tune, we can show how much their made tune matches with the original tune, With some basic criteria qualified, they can access the next video lecture. Here, the most important role to make this happen is for the mentors. So, what will mentors get out of all this? We can have a rating column for the mentors (for a same project, various mentors can have videos uploaded), and the mentors with maximum ratings will be displayed on the website of MB or sugarlabs and if the board permits we can also plan to give then some goodies, This will attract and motivate the mentors more to give quality videos. Also, mentors will get some recognition like on github, we display the new contributors for the project. Students are getting benefitted as they can learn music with just logging in the website. We may need to have a database for storing the details of students and their progress. This is what my basic idea is up till now. — You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#2800 (reply in thread)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AA6PXYNGD447GKAFFRI2SCTS5E4XNANCNFSM4W5CK6IQ> .

-- Walter Bender Sugar Labs http://www.sugarlabs.org <http://www.sugarlabs.org>

[Nirali0029]

So should we wait for this functionality to be added in MB-2?

[walterbender]

step one in either case is a clear definition of what we should be building/doing. Maybe add a discussion to https://github.com/sugarlabs/musicblocks-2/discussions

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On Thu, Feb 4, 2021 at 1:48 AM Nirali Sanghvi ***@***.***> wrote: So should we wait for this functionality to be added in MB-2? — You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#2800 (reply in thread)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AA6PXYPSDNTEFAGOTYHHA5TS5I7KRANCNFSM4W5CK6IQ> .

-- Walter Bender Sugar Labs http://www.sugarlabs.org <http://www.sugarlabs.org>

[pikurasa]

@Nirali0029 FWIW, we are in the midst of creating some videos, led by students and teachers.

We hope to have these released soon.

We're also thinking of ways to simplify the lesson plan creation process. (In fact, this is a topic for this year's GSoC: https://github.com/sugarlabs/GSoC/blob/master/Ideas-2024.md#make-your-own-lesson-plan-for-music-blocks)

The thing that probably takes the most time when creating lesson plans is capturing screenshots (or exporting SVGs) of the blocks and art on the screen, as well as generating the music and creating images for that. The only thing that I can think of right now that MB could do that would make this more convenient is a feature that saves images (including music notation) into a sort of portfolio.