STEAM education: Empowering students to become music inventors through the application of coding, electronic building blocks and contemporary music composition techniques

1. To what extent does instrument making be a kind of music making?
2. What is the difficulty of incorporating the STEAM initiative in classroom music?
3. How does the “traditional” paradigm of creative music-making activity be shifted under the STEAM initiative?

Recently, there are strong needs to promote STEAM education to nurture students' creativity, collaboration and problem-solving skills through the integration of academic disciplines namely Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics. With the funding of Teaching Development Grant by the University, the presenter has successfully launched a course entitled Creativity in Music which features musical creativity and STEAM education. It enables student of different levels to enjoy creative music-making and foster innovation.

The workshop aims at providing hands-on experience to the participants on how to incorporate coding software, electronic building blocks and contemporary music composition techniques in classroom music. The content of the workshop will provide hands-on experiences to the participants in which they will be guided to (1) Invent a musical instrument(s) through the application of electronic building blocks; and (2) Create/Improvise a piece of creative music for the instruments. The presenter will demonstrate how to design a music programme by applying relevant coding language which connects objects with virtual patch to create interactive sounds for the invented electronic instrument. Copyright © 2018 International Society for Music Education.