Minecraft as a gateway to music composition for students

Could a video game that children already love be the key to sparking their interest in music composition? That question drove a research project at the University of Arkansas that brought together music education and computer science students to create a modified version of Minecraft—one that lets young players embed their own original compositions inside the three-dimensional structures they build.

The educational thinker John Dewey wrote over a century ago that teaching students with outdated methods deprives them of their future. His words still challenge music educators to rethink their approaches. While technology has been introduced into classrooms, it has rarely led to deep shifts in teaching practice. Many music teachers are comfortable using email or browsing the web but are far less at ease integrating technology or video games into their lessons. Games like Minecraft are often seen as simple entertainment for home, not as tools for the classroom. Yet video games can offer students ownership over their learning, room to explore, and meaningful rewards.

Good teachers build on what students already know. Every day, children bring a rich blend of cultural knowledge and personal experience to school. Recognizing and using these interests makes new learning feel valuable. Minecraft, with over 35 million copies sold since 2009, is an obvious place to start. It is a world children already inhabit, one they find both fun and addictive. For educators, the game can act as a learning environment, a design tool, and a platform for developing collaboration, communication, and creative problem-solving.

What Minecraft already offers for music making

Minecraft already includes a built-in way to make music. Players can place note blocks that produce a colored note when triggered by Redstone—the game's equivalent of electricity. These blocks have a range of two full octaves for each available instrument. But the system has real limitations. It can only play one note at a time, which restricts users to melodic lines. Note blocks cannot be stacked to create chords or harmony, and they are limited to a single straight-line arrangement of just 48 blocks. That means a player’s musical composition exists separately from any building or structure they create. Composing with note blocks asks children to think like engineers rather than connecting their musical and engineering thought processes.

The research behind CompositionCraft

Two music education students and two computer science majors at the University of Arkansas worked together during the 2017–18 school year to address these shortfalls. The team wanted to know whether Minecraft could be modified so that the three-dimensional objects children build in the game could play original musical compositions. Could this approach give music teachers a bridge between their students' love of video games and the craft of creating music? The project, supervised by a music education professor and a professor from the Tesseract Center for Immersive Environments and Game Design, became known as CompositionCraft. The computer science students wrote code in JavaScript to weave the music students' ideas into the game, keeping the core gameplay intact.

The theoretical foundation of the project rests on two key ideas. Jerome Bruner described three stages of cognitive development: learning by doing (enactive), learning through images (iconic), and learning with symbols (symbolic). The use of iconic representation is already well established in music education as a way to help children grasp musical concepts before they read standard notation. Blair’s work showed that the images young children create to represent music offer valuable insight into their musical perception and development. The project used these ideas to design a tool that lets children compose music visually, by arranging blocks in three-dimensional space.

How CompositionCraft works

Inside Minecraft’s block-based world, every block equals one quarter note in musical notation. That makes it natural to map musical ideas onto the game’s geometry. To overcome Minecraft's existing limits, the team introduced a new game element: the Composition Block, or c-block. This block is the control center for making music. It has its own user interface where players choose which building materials stand in for differently pitched notes, whether natural, sharp, or flat, and which block represents a musical rest. The c-block contains playback controls.

The c-block operates in two phases. In the build phase it searches outward from its position for valid blocks, adding them to a song array. Unlike the original note blocks, which can only run in a straight line, CompositionCraft can trace a path around corners. The play phase works on a timer—every second the next set of notes plays. As notes or groups of notes sound, they are highlighted with a set of virtual stars so the player can follow the composition. Players can also create longer note durations: placing a flag on the first of two identical pitches, each two blocks long, ties them together to create the effect of a half note or longer.

A test in a real classroom

One of the teachers who took CompositionCraft into her classroom was Mellissa Salguero at P.S. 48 in the Bronx, New York. She asked her students to begin by creating melodic patterns on a paper grid with 20 rows and 8 vertical blocks in each row to represent a musical staff. Once the children had designed their melodies on paper, they transferred their ideas into the Minecraft world, which she had sectioned into separate zones for each class.

Students faced genuine musical decisions. What material would represent this particular note? What would signal a flat, a sharp, or a rest? After entering their melodies, each child explained their process while classmates analyzed the patterns and helped refine them. In the photo from the classroom, the top set of blocks shows a first attempt and the color-coded row below is the revision.

As Salguero noted, "Students are very willing to compose this way. And, this is an amazing link we needed to make composing accessible to all."

Developing 21st-century skills through music

Working with CompositionCraft encouraged more than just music learning. Children pushed each other's thinking, requiring peers to predict, question, clarify, summarize, and connect ideas to defend their musical choices. The game seemed to foster problem solving, communication, collaboration, and creativity—the very skills that are essential for the modern world. By giving children a platform where they can pose and solve problems while composing music, the tool also helps them build a shared vocabulary for musical concepts and gives both individuals and the class a sense of empowerment as musical thinkers.

Conclusion

CompositionCraft offers music teachers a way to connect the joy children find in video games with the discipline of creating music. It creates space for reciprocity between student and teacher—a genuine dialogue where both sides teach each other. In Salguero’s test it enriched the ways students and teachers understood music, extending learning to more complex musical ideas. The result is an expanded vision of what is possible in the music classroom, adding real value to children's education.

Barrett (2004) considered how children represent music through invented notation in a case study published in the Bulletin for the Council of Research in Music Education (vol. 161/162, pp. 19–28). Davidson and Scripp (1988) examined young children's musical representations as windows onto cognition in Generative Processes in Music: The Psychology of Performance, Improvisation, and Composition (pp. 195–230, Oxford: Clarendon Press). Gromko (1994) studied children's invented notations as measures of musical understanding in Psychology of Music (vol. 22, pp. 136–47). Gromko and Poorman (1998) investigated developmental trends and relationships in children's aural perception and symbol use in the Journal of Research in Music Education (vol. 46, no. 1, pp. 16–23). Uptis (1987) traced a child's development of music notation through composition in Arts and Learning Research (vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 102–19). Uptis (1990b) authored This Too Is Music (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann Education Books). Uptis (1992) wrote Can I Play You My Song? The Composition and Invented Notation of Children (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann Educational Books). Uptis (1990a) explored children's invented notation of familiar and unfamiliar melodies in Psychomusicology (vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 89–106). Boardman, Landis, and Andress (1966) published Exploring Music (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston). Boardman and Andress (1981) released The Music Book (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston). Boardman, Andress, Pautz, and Willman (1988) authored Holt Music (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston).