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 video call or a classroom seat. He follows a student's process inside Soundtrap itself: work in progress, comments left directly on the project, a running dialogue that lets him track development and give feedback without ever needing to meet the student physically.

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. He tracks authenticity the same way any teacher would recognize a student's own voice over time: through language, through how a process develops, through getting to know a student's work across years, not through a webcam.

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.