Learning Recursion from Music and Music from Recursion

Recursion is a fundamental concept in several courses in computer science but is often one of the most confusing concepts for beginners. On the other hand, music is universal and appeals to most people. This paper is a novel attempt to understand and utilize the synergy between music and computer science to teach recursion to freshman students. The paper presents the retrograde strategy and collaboration techniques used during the composition of music and explains how these ideas can be used to learn recursion and stack data structure. We taught recursion to 30 first year undergraduate students in computer science using the normal approach and then demonstrated the control flow using the retrograde strategy. We found that around 81.2% preferred correlation with music. We see this as an initial step towards a deeper correlation of composing music and composing code.

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