The team have created an online ‘workbench’ that allows teachers to incorporate the technology and tools developed as part of iMuSciCA into their lessons. ‘Visual information is not always the best way of communicating things like geometry or arithmetic.’ Dr Monica Gori, Fondazione Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Genoa, Italy It can help them understand concepts like frequency and amplitude.’ ‘The students can see how the density of the material affects the sound and see the sound wave it produces. ‘If they change the metal that a string is made of then the way the string vibrates and the waveform of the sound it produces is different,’ explained Dr Katsouros. Students design a virtual musical instrument on a computer, where they can alter its physical properties to understand how that impacts the sound it produces. The iMuSciCA project is using music to teach secondary school children about difficult concepts like wave theory in physics and equations in mathematics. Dr Katsouros and his colleagues are hoping to introduce this way of thinking at an earlier stage. This sort of interdisciplinary collaboration is increasingly common at university level and in industry, often leading to exciting new developments in technology, science and art. ‘When you bring people together from the arts and STEM subjects, they can work together to have very creative ideas.’ ‘We are trying to make this STEAM learning approach known to the educational community,’ said Dr Vassilis Katsouros from the Athena Research Centre's Institute for Language and Speech Processing in Athens, Greece, and coordinator of a project called iMuSciCA. It is leading to a new way of teaching that aims to combine science, technology, engineering, arts and maths, collectively known as STEAM. Indeed, science and artistic subjects like music have traditionally been treated entirely separately in education.īut researchers believe breaking down the arbitrary barriers between science and art could help pupils grasp tricky concepts more easily. The thrum of a violin string or beat of a drum might at first appear to have little to do with physics, fractions or angles.
0 kommentar(er)
