Integrating music into Computer Science (CS) education can stimulate children’s creativity, change the stereotypical perspective of CS, and encourage women, ethnic or cultural minorities involved in the Computer Science area. In this paper, we use Augmented Reality (AR) technology to design a tangible programming system – AR-MPro for children, acting as a bridge between programming and music. It allows children to create customized AR effects to visualize music with low-cost materials by constructing tangible program sequences. AR-MPro is expected to broaden participation in computing, and be more intuitive, intriguing and instructional to enrich children’s creating and programming experiences.

Cite this work: Qiao Jin, Danli Wang, Haoran Yun, and Svetlana Yarosh. 2023. Shape of Music: AR-based Tangible Programming Tool for Music Visualization. In Proceedings of the 22nd Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference (IDC ’23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 647–651. https://doi.org/10.1145/3585088.3593872