A Way Back Into School

Some of Culjak's students are "hemmasittare," young people who've stopped attending school altogether, a problem that's been growing across Sweden for years. Traditional schooling assumes a student shows up in a room; for a hemmasittare, that assumption is the whole barrier.

Other students arrive with thousands of hours of gaming behind them and no music background at all. Getting them from consuming a game to creating something meant a way in that didn't start with an instrument they didn't know how to play.

For hemmasittare, Culjak doesn't require a classroom seat, but some assessments still need a screen. For an instrument or vocal performance, he needs to see and hear a student at least once, live or recorded, to confidently match that voice or playing to that student. Once he's made that identification, he can assess everything else the student submits directly inside Soundtrap: work in progress, comments left on the project, a running dialogue that lets him track development without needing an in-person meeting.

For students coming from gaming, he leans on Soundtrap's templates and built-in tutorials, enough to get someone with general digital aptitude surprisingly far, then move them past the templates into the software's deeper features.

School, without ever sharing a room. Culjak has multiple examples, across years, of hemmasittare completing their schooling entirely through Soundtrap: some through music projects, others through the platform's podcast feature. Instrument and vocal work still requires a live or recorded video check-in, so Culjak can confidently match a voice or performance to a specific student. Once that's established, he can assess everything after it the same way any teacher recognizes a student's own voice over time: through language, through how a process develops, through getting to know a student's work across years.

From consumer to creator. Students who've spent, in Culjak's words, "incredible amounts" of time gaming find a version of that same pull in Soundtrap: enough fun in it that they get hooked in a positive way, moving from passively playing a game to working with purpose on a screen.