* The project will unite students from UPR High School with their peers from various schools in the PR Department of Education
October 20, 2022
Remix, a new project that integrates music and programming to motivate students to study computer science, continues its impact program by integrating several schools from the Puerto Rico Department of Education (DEPR).
The Remix project is a collaborative research between the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus (UPR-RRP) and the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), which seeks to increase the computational thinking skills of Latin and Spanish language students in Puerto Rico and the United States.
One of the objectives of the project is to increase the number of Latin middle and high school students interested in computer careers by integrating culturally relevant musical practices.
This project is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSFfor its acronym in English) to train high school students, through the program Advancement of informal STEM learning. The NSF financially supports the initiative with an allocation of $ 834,647 starting from 2020 and its validity period will be until June 2024.
According to Professor Rafael Arce Nazario, principal researcher of Remix and professor in the Computer Science Department of the Faculty of Natural Sciences, the workshops afterschoolstarted this October, it will last until the next semester, roughly, until April 2023. In Remix “students will learn how to design and program their own songs, using the platform Ear sketch, developed at Georgia Tech. They will create musical compositions related to the stories of their community and their heritage, while developing computational thinking skills, “explained Professor Arce Nazario. Likewise, they deal with musical, sound editing and / or computational concepts, which are put into practice. practice by students.
For her part, Dr. Isaris Quiñones Pérez, coordinator of the project, shared that during the academic year 2022-2023 the workshops afterschool are being implemented in three schools. The schools belonging to the Puerto Rico Department of Education (DEPR) are the Monserrate León De Irizarry School in Cabo Rojo, whose main teacher is Brenda Estévez, and the Luz América Calderón School in Carolina, led by the director Xiomara López.
Meanwhile, students from nearby schools Miguel Such and Ramón Vilá Mayo, also from the DEPR, are integrated into the workshops offered at the UPR Secondary School (UHS), under the guidance of its director, Dr. Agustín Corchado. Students meet every Thursday – this semester, through December 8 -, from 3:45 pm to 5:00 pm in the Computer Center of the High School of the University of Puerto Rico (UHS).
Currently the project has a total participation of about 60 students. At the end of the workshops – in the second semester – an activity called “Code and Music Jam” will be carried out, where the participating students are recognized and their musical pieces are shown.
To listen to the pieces of music that the students of these workshops have produced in the past, you can access: https://ccom.uprrp.edu/~race/camp2022/. You can also visit the site: https://bit.ly/remezclapr.
