A Web Prototype to Teach Music and Computational Thinking Through Building Blocks

This paper presents the recent evolution of a Web prototype originally conceived to teach music and computational thinking to preschool and primary school learners through a gamification approach. The software tool, called Legato, is based on the metaphor of building blocks, whose characteristics (e.g., position in space, shape, and color) can be associated with basic music parameters (e.g., pitch, rhythm, and timbre). Legato is a Web app written using standard languages, such as HTML5, CSS and JavaScript; besides, it adopts the Web MIDI API to produce sounds. The prototype is made publicly available for evaluation and use in an educational context.