In this article, we will present the initial phase of our research aimed at teaching programming music. We focused on the selection of suitable programming environment and its use for the design, development and validation of educational material for upper secondary students.

We provide an overview of studies focusing on the impact of music and musical activities on students' cognitive functions. According to several studies, music helps students develop abstract thinking and logical reasoning, which are important for programming. For example, understanding rhythmic patterns in music can be helpful for understanding number sequences and data structures. However, teaching programming is not possible without a suitable programming environment. In recent years, Python-based environments have been predominantly used in secondary schools in our country. We have considered several environments that allow to program music in Python. Specifically, these were Jython Music, TunePad and SonicPy in combination with the PythonSonic module. We discuss the advantages and disadvantages of these environments and explain our decision to use Jython Music.

We have developed educational material focused on the topics: tone coding, variable, randomness, loop, branching, subroutine, thread, list. Each topic includes a set of graded tasks with data files and solutions. We obtained feedback from two independent computer science teachers and modified it according to their comments. The teachers concluded that they would not use the educational material created by us as a whole, as the time allocation for the computer science subject is too low and the curriculum requires too many topics to be covered. However, they would use some of the tasks in the project-based learning.

We verified some of the tasks with a high school student and with students of informatics education. The high school student had previous experience in reading music notation and playing violin and piano. Although she had no prior programming skills, she was able to successfully create a program containing variables, loops, and threads within 30 minutes. Students of informatics education were experienced in programming in Python. They had completed 4 semesters of programming in Python. In 90 minutes they were able to solve tasks requiring the use of variables, loops, threads and lists. They found the tasks attractive and they would use some of them with their students in the future to enhance their programming lessons. Both teachers and future teachers pointed out that transcribing music notation into note codes can be boring for many students. Therefore, we plan to supplement the educational material with data files with note codes.

In our future research, we plan to validate the developed educational material with a larger group of secondary school students in the form of design-based research. We have an ambition to validate the educational material also with blind students. Educational materials used in schools are oriented to programming of graphical output, which is unusable for the blind, as they cannot check the result of the program by themselves. Music programming could be a suitable alternative for them.

Keywords: Music programming, secondary students, educational material.