Live coding for blind children

Client: Will Thoms, Morgan Stanley

Educational programming languages like Scratch are rather disappointing for blind children - the visual syntax feedback is no help, the animated visual output is not motivating, and audio screen readers can't read the source code back to you. But it should be possible to make an educational programming language that is easy and motivational for blind children. It would output music, rather than animations, so blind children can create their own artistic results. It would create standard text source code, so screen readers work. Both of these things are already provided by Sam Aaron's amazing Sonic Pi system, but Sonic Pi doesn't have a very convenient way for blind children to create musical code. Your task is to design a simple customisable musical instrument, using Modular Robotics Cubelets, that outputs its state as a running Sonic Pi program for children to inspect (using a screen reader) and modify. You will be able to use a newly-released API for Sonic Pi that supports code insertion via standard Open Sound Control messages.