Performances

This past week my students did a project that's basically straight out of our physics curriculum that I never had the guts to try last year.  It goes with our waves unit, with an emphasis on sound (the curriculum specifies it as sound and light, but I left out the light part).  The project involves making a musical instrument and performing for the class, and also writing about how the instrument makes sound and how the sound gets to the listener.

Some of my fears about this project were well-founded.  The vast majority of the instruments were basically paper plate maracas filled with beans.  Some groups just got up and shook their maracas without any particular rhythm for the required 1 minute.  A few people refused to perform entirely.  Most of the performances were unrehearsed.

But I am glad I tried the project, and would probably do it again.  It was nice to have the kids present something for the class (although I probably should have had some form of public speaking or presenting of solutions or something before this to make it more normal and less of an ordeal).  Some of the performances were hilarious, and though they were not what I would call ideal, respectful audience members, the kids seemed to enjoy watching the performances and many said they had fun performing.  For next year I need to think about how to make kids make a better variety of instruments, and how to make sure the presenting takes less time.  I might make it an optional performance next year, so kids who are outgoing and/or creative enough to want to do it can, and the other kids can do a different set of project requirements.  I thought more kids would go with the write-physics-song-lyrics option, but I think a combination of stage fright and laziness prevented it for more groups, so I might make that mandatory next year.  The one student who did sing an actual song (Bruno Mars's Lazy Song adapted with physics lyrics, which he found on the internet) totally brought down the house in his class and won the "most creative" voting by a landslide.

Other highlights included the kid who made his own awesome-looking cardboard guitar (which unfortunately had plain old string for strings and barely made a sound at all) and asked my permission in advance to smash the guitar like a rock star at the end of his performance, the kid who made a really cool-sounding rain stick at home using a fabric bolt tube, nails, and rice, and used it as his group's grand finale, and the girls who made a beat with their maracas and had two enthusiastic (and rather provocative) dancers.