Back to School Beats Competition
2025, Sponsored by EarSketch
Ready to rock the start of the school year? Kick off the school year with rhythm, creativity, and some serious sound and join EarSketch for the Back to School Beats Competition, where student music producers, DJs, and coders go head-to-head in a showdown of sound and style.
Competition Deadline: 11:59PM on November 21, 2025
Jump to section:
Requirements
Music
-
Song length must be between 30 seconds and 2 minutes
-
Song must have at least five (5) unique music tracks (sounds)
-
Song must include stems from more than one artist
-
Song must be a remix, which may include:
-
Including more than one artist on EarSketch
-
Changing tempo, pitch, and/or order of beats
-
Adding effects, loop beats, create sub-beats
-
​
​Code
-
Final code must run without errors and play in the digital audio workstation (DAW)
-
Code must include fitMedia to insert sound clips
-
Code must include comments to describe code and document the message in the song
-
Recommended: Code should include at least one level of complexity: loops, conditional statements, makeBeat(), custom functions
​
Story
-
Submission must include a short reflection explaining the message of your song
-
Recommended: Students should choose a theme or genre to their song (Theme Examples: friendship, family, their interests, etc.; Genre Examples: country, hip hop, etc.)
Resources
Getting Started
We're excited to bring back the Back to School Beats competition. Here are some resources to help you get started. If you are new to EarSketch we recommend checking out our Getting Started in EarSketch YouTube playlist or attending our Teacher PD on September 10. We've also created a handout for your and/or your students' reference.
Getting Started in EarSketch
Getting Started in EarSketch
Creating an Account and Your First Script
Text to Block Coding Example
Sample Tutorial
Discover EarSketch with William
Feel free to share these videos with your students or our
Lesson
Looking for a lesson to teach with the competition? Check out our Introduction to EarSketch Byte-Sized Beat! We've included a lesson plan, slides, student worksheet, and template code to help make the jump to get started as easy as possible! We recommend spending 2-3 days with your class on this lesson as working on their songs in EarSketch may take some time for students. The template/sample code exists to help beginner students understand the format for a solid submission. Students may import the script so they can edit the code and create their song.
Ready to submit?
Students can either submit their songs directly from the EarSketch platform or by going to a link. We recommend submitting directly from EarSketch since it helps students to skip the step of finding and copying/pasting their script-URL, but either way will work! The video demonstrates how you can find your script-URL.
​
Please note students under the age of 13 should have their parents/guardians submit on their behalf.
Submit directly from EarSketch
-
Find your song in the Script Library
-
Click on the three blue lines next to your Script Name to expand the menu
-
Click Submit to Competition
-
Complete the form and click submit
Submit externally using a link
-
Find your song in the Script Library
-
Click on the three blue lines next to your Script Name to expand the menu
-
Click Share
-
Click the blue clipboard next to the Share URL. This copies your script-URL.
-
Go to the submission button below
-
Complete the form
-
Paste in your copied EarSketch script-URL
-
Finish the form and click submit