Over the past few weeks, Second Year computing lessons have been awash with funky beats and a banging baseline whilst pupils prepared their entries for a national music coding competition.
Hosted by Amazon Future Engineer, a computer science and STEM education programme, and legendary hip-hop artist, Pharrell Williams, the pupils were tasked with creating an uplifting tune in a challenge entitled, Your Voice is Power, which asked pupils to express their own voice, write code and create an original song remix that promotes equity. Lessons have been productive and vibrant as the pupils have worked independently with a new platform called EarSketch to create beats based on Pharrell’s track ‘Entrepreneur’.
Manique Wilson, teacher of Computing at Pocklington School said: “Our pupils have fully embraced the brief to produce some fantastic remixes using music samples, a knowledge of Python programming and a good sense of rhythm. I have been extremely impressed with their creative skill and coding expertise, plus the big grand prize of £500 from Amazon is an added incentive to reach the high notes!” All the pupils’ entries will be sent off to be judged and the winners will be announced on 24th May 2023 so watch this space!
Alongside the national competition, Pocklington School held its own in-house contest to judge the favourite creative remix from the year group. Prep School Year 6 STEM Associates, who have a keen interest in STEM subjects, were invited to judge the toe-tapping entries to find four finalists from the class heats. The finalists were Isabel Moorhouse, Oliver Marshall, Martha Preston and Lara Dettmar
Pupils from Prep and Senior School and staff were invited to vote for their favourite composition – a task which was apparently deemed to be difficult, as the quality of all four entries was so high. However, Oliver Marshall was named the winner and said: “it feels great to have had the opportunity to win the award because I really enjoyed the project and exploring new skills. ”
Manique concluded: “This has been a fantastic opportunity for our young coders to take part in. It is safe to say the whole year group are winners as they have mastered some challenging programming whilst enjoying the sound of music and being creative. Well done Second Years!”
Click the links below to listen to our winning and finalists’ entries from the in-house competition.