Primary school teachers who teach music as a non-subject often experience their singing as inadequate. They sing with the children with a guilty conscience (Hammel 2011) or avoid singing altogether (Schellberg 2005). These research findings are consistent with observations from music subjects in university teacher training programmes for students without music as major subject.

All children should have the opportunity to develop their singing voice. However, there are not enough specialists in the schools (Lehmann-Wermser 2020), and most families hardly sing at all (Weyrauch 2024). This is why singing in primary schools is also left to teachers who teach music as a non-specialist. By training their singing skills, primary school teachers should overcome their fears of singing. In addition, they are to receive content and technical support for everyday school life so that they can sing with the children more often and with better intonation.

In collaboration with several institutions, an app (prototypes) has been developed to help practise secure intonation and provide a repertoire of songs and playbacks. Both application areas are coordinated with each other.

This article describes how the app was developed with the help of participatory design and illustrates the process step by step: At the beginning of the winter semester 2024/25, the University of Kaiserslautern-Landau developed the didactic concept based on the wishes expressed by students (critical friends). Aalen University then developed prototypes for the app's user interface, which were presented on 20 January 2025. In April 2025, recordings will be made with musicians from the State Philharmonic Orchestra and professional singers. The technical implementation will then be completed and ready for use in October 2025.

After that, the app will be used in everyday life at schools, regularly evaluated and revised. It will also be made available to nursery teachers.

The use of digital technologies in music lessons at school enables learning arrangements that offer a space for innovative (Ahlers, 2018) and creative learning processes (Lam, 2023). In addition, digital literacy skills can be promoted (OECD, 2020).

The concept of live coding offers a special opportunity for interdisciplinary learning in the subjects of music and computer science (Blackwell et al., 2022; Burnard et al., 2014; Petrie, 2019). In contrast to previous research projects, in this teaching project the use of the visual programming language “Scratch” was investigated, as it is more accessible for learners due to its graphical, block-orientated interface.

The teaching project was first trialled with a school class of learners aged 12 to 13 and in a second cycle with learners aged 14 to 15 at a secondary school in Germany. The aims were to develop competences in the areas of computational thinking and composing music as well as to promote the learners' creativity. To this end, a series of 8 lessons was developed based on the principles of self-directed and individualised learning.

There is particular potential in self-direction, which goes hand in hand with increased motivation and individualisation. The thinking and structuring processes from the field of computational thinking required for composing with a programming language opened up new approaches to musical phenomena such as metre, rhythm and pitch for the learners. In addition, learners with little previous music-related experience benefited from the low-threshold nature of the compositional approach.