Gefen and Tamar Students Learn how to "Draw" Sound!

Dear Friends of Gefen and Tamar,

Yes, you read that title right: draw sound. Let me explain...

This week we wrapped up our Science unit. Students have spent the majority of the semester learning about sound and acoustical engineering. Most recently (and more specifically), they have been learning about spectrograms and how they work. A spectrogram is essentially an image that represents sound. After the students looked at various types of spectrograms made by experts in the field, they broke into groups to come up with their own original systems for representing sound. Each group's system had to communicate to viewers volume, duration and pitch all at the same time.

It was a challenging task and students got confused and frustrated at times. However, by following the Engineering Design Process, which involves imagining, testing and re-imagining, they were able to come up with some pretty cool sound representation systems.

As a way to test these systems, each group used its own system to make a spectrogram that represented a specific bird call (we have a collection of bird calls on a CD). I recorded who did what. On Wednesday we had a "pop quiz". All the students introduced their sound representation systems to the rest of the class. Once everyone understood how to "read" each of the systems, I played the bird calls for the whole class one by one. The students had to match the five groups' spectrograms with the bird calls they represented.

Guess how this went?

Actually, everyone in the class got every single match correct! Success!!!! I was so impressed. This is an example of hard, challenging work paying off. The students felt so proud and excited about their creations. Hamorah Janis and I were proud and excited too.

In January, we will begin a new unit on light and optical engineering.

Until then, have a wonderful winter break and a happy New Year!

Best,
Hamorah Eliza