Today, I'm going to show you one way to write educational songs with AI to make learning fun and memorable for your students, children, or tutees.
Music is one of the best ways to make information memorable—and more fun to learn. My 9th grade algebra teacher used the tune of "Pop! Goes the Weasle" to teach us the quadratic equation, and decades later, the song still gets stuck in my head for hours if I hear or even think about the quadratic equation (strangely frequent despite not being a teacher, parent with a kid learning alegebra, or a mathematician).
Writing songs the old-fashioned way can be a little time-consuming, especially if wordplay, pitch, and rhythm aren't your thing. But now, you can write educational songs about any subject with AI and have lyrics generated for you in under a minute.
You can use music to teach any subject—languages, literature, math, history, science, and even music!
For this article (as with my other articles), I'm using Microsoft Copilot, which is free.
Write educational songs with AI
First, pick a tune for your song
First, I recommend picking a tune that you and your students/tutees/kids already know. I suggest choosing something simple like a nursery rhyme. You want the melody to be easy so the learners only need to focus on learning the lyrics.
Next, ask Copilot to write the lyrics
In the following example, I'm going to ask Copilot to write me a song about the alkali metal group from the Periodic Table of the Elements that can be sung to the tune of "This Old Man."
When you create educational songs with AI, it's important to emphasize the audience the song is for to make sure the topic and lyrics are appropriate for their learning level and age.
Following is my initial prompt:
Can you write a fun, catchy song for 6th graders with simple wording about Group 1 (alkali metals) of the period table that can be sung to the tune of This Old Man?
Following is what Copilot gave me. For fun as well as illustrative and demonstration purposes, I notated it into sheet music using Flat, an online music notation site. Press play and have a sing-along!
First version of This Old Group song
Refine the song with iterative prompting
If you tried to sing this song, you'll have seen that it works pretty well for the most part, but the fourth lines of a couple of the verses were a bit too wordy for the tune. So, I went back to Copilot for some iterative prompting—the process of refining and tweaking until you get the results you want.
I went through quite a lot of iterative prompting to get to the final version of the song, so for your sake, I'll just share some of the prompts:
The first one I tried was:
Can you please try rewriting the song about alkali metals with the element names in the second line instead of the fourth line?
A couple of sample prompts to restructure the song:
Can you please separate out verse 2 and verse 4 of the song so that each element has its own verse and keep the same structure with This old group?
Can you please change the 4th line in the verse about potassium to a different fact and rhyme with line three?
And for some later iterations:
For this verse, can you find a shorter word for radioactive?
Can you try a fact with bananas?
Can you try another fact that rhymes with paddywhack?
Can you try another one?
Copilot is pretty intuitive in that it doesn't always need you to be super specific on follow-up prompts which you can see in my last couple of prompts.
Since my song has 6 verses and I wanted everything to rhyme and be perfect for my sheet music, I probably did over a dozen iterative prompts. But if you're less picky, you can stop when you're satisfied with your song.
Have another sing of my final song for Group 1 – Alkali Metals of the Periodic Table of the Elements!
Final version of This Old Group song
The finished masterpiece in all its glory :)
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I hope you found this guide on how to create fun and educational songs with AI helpful. Remember, songwriting is an art, and AI, as a machine, can't get it 100% right, so you need to put in some effort with iterative prompting. But nothing will beat the sense of accomplishment when your song comes together and you hear your learners having fun singing it!
I'd love to hear what songs you come up with. Feel free to share them with me on Twitter/X @HelloCappuccino!
