Post by Yvonne Liu-Constant & Elizabeth Cavicchi,
New England group of Hawkins Centers of Learning
New England group of Hawkins Centers of Learning
Mess About with Sound was the theme for the New England group of the Hawkins Centers of Learning on the morning of Saturday, November 5, 2016. Among the 20 participants were educators of students ranging from early childhood to graduate school, as well as graduate students in education. Materials for exploration included: strings, wires, glasses, water, pipes, tubes, wood, sand, colored sugar, glass bottles, tin and plastic boxes, violin bows and resin, tuning forks, metal bowls, etc. The playful gathering met in a classroom with six working tables, side benches and a sink, at the Edgerton Center at MIT, Cambridge MA.
The MIT Edgerton Center offers a range of experiential learning, hands-on activities and engineering challenge projects and clubs for students and participants from grade school to graduate school. http://edgerton.mit.edu/ Through its many K12 programs, children and teachers from local schools, or coming from other communities and international settings, participate in hands-on sessions and extended workshops. In a single session, children working in pairs design, construct and race a car made from Lego; a summer workshop has teens forming teams for developing and constructing an open-ended engineering of their own design. In doing this work, the Edgerton Center continues the legacy of strobe pioneer “Doc” Harold Edgerton, whose boundless spirit of investigation encouraged students to follow their curiosity in experimenting and questioning.
The MIT Edgerton Center offers a range of experiential learning, hands-on activities and engineering challenge projects and clubs for students and participants from grade school to graduate school. http://edgerton.mit.edu/ Through its many K12 programs, children and teachers from local schools, or coming from other communities and international settings, participate in hands-on sessions and extended workshops. In a single session, children working in pairs design, construct and race a car made from Lego; a summer workshop has teens forming teams for developing and constructing an open-ended engineering of their own design. In doing this work, the Edgerton Center continues the legacy of strobe pioneer “Doc” Harold Edgerton, whose boundless spirit of investigation encouraged students to follow their curiosity in experimenting and questioning.
Discovering the Unexpected
The gathering started with self introductions on personal experiences with sound. Sound is upcoming as a unit for two grade school teachers, who said children enjoy sound, while they wonder about getting into its “intricacies”. A teacher of one-year-olds described the loud screaming of infants as “Just for Fun!”, showing their fascination in the sounds they make. A preschool teacher reflected that, while “Kids love noise!”, you need both noise and silence -”music has silence too”. An education graduate student, having read essays by David Hawkins, was intrigued to play with sound; a jazz musician and her teen daughter sought to connect their music with teaching children.
The activity period began when Elizabeth Cavicchi, an instructor at the Edgerton Center, invited participants to:
The activity period began when Elizabeth Cavicchi, an instructor at the Edgerton Center, invited participants to:
Explore something that makes a sound with materials on your tables.
Materials on the six tables included: soda straws, scissors, balloons, tape, rubber bands, string, popsicle sticks paper cups. Before long, the room was filled with sound, conversations, and laughter, as strangers quickly bonded while: blowing up balloons, stretching balloons, rubbing and drumming with filled balloons, blowing by mouth over the tops of soda straws, producing high pitched sounds from materials, and squeals of hilarity among participants. Suddenly, a balloon popped, evoking shrieks in reaction.
Co-facilitator Yvonne Liu-Constant, early childhood professor at Lesley University, brought new materials, including glass bottles of various heights, to the tables. Both deep and high tones sounded from blowing over the bottles’ top, by mouth and soda straw. Rubber bands were stretched across bottles longitudinally, cookie tins and a dustpan. Fingers or fingernails plucked the stretched rubber bands. After 10 minutes, these activities were brought to a pause when Elizabeth made a ringing sound by hitting a brass bowl to gather people’s attention. Elizabeth then invited participants “to share discoveries, sounds, curiosities”. Those that blew over a bottle by mouth and straw described and demonstrated their “fog horn” and their surprise at producing a “whistle; I didn’t expect a whistle!” The video below reveals Amanda’s thrill at “discovering the unexpected! Whee”:
Co-facilitator Yvonne Liu-Constant, early childhood professor at Lesley University, brought new materials, including glass bottles of various heights, to the tables. Both deep and high tones sounded from blowing over the bottles’ top, by mouth and soda straw. Rubber bands were stretched across bottles longitudinally, cookie tins and a dustpan. Fingers or fingernails plucked the stretched rubber bands. After 10 minutes, these activities were brought to a pause when Elizabeth made a ringing sound by hitting a brass bowl to gather people’s attention. Elizabeth then invited participants “to share discoveries, sounds, curiosities”. Those that blew over a bottle by mouth and straw described and demonstrated their “fog horn” and their surprise at producing a “whistle; I didn’t expect a whistle!” The video below reveals Amanda’s thrill at “discovering the unexpected! Whee”:
This idea of “discovering the unexpected” was a thread through much of the sharing. From another table, Cindy shared about her initial exploration of rubber bands stretched on a tin box:
| I discovered that I didn’t like it. This was too safe, it was going with an idea that I already know existed. It’s more fun to afterwards say, that’s why it wasn’t working! I was trying to repeat something that existed already. I realized I needed to let go of what I already “know” (she gestured air quotes), so I could get into something that I didn’t know. It was fun watching others who were more experimental... |
Several participants expressed an initial sense of relationships holding between the materials making the sounds, and the sounds produced. Noticing that rubber bands of different tautness sounded differently, Devon, an education student wondered if the different sized bottles might sound differently. By blowing into soda straws that she bent sharply (so as to seal off the tube), first in half, then in quarters, Kate found sounds of increasingly high pitch (An interesting extension - we don’t know if she tried it- would be to cut a soda straw to the same length as the bent sealed one, and compare the sounds of blowing into both tubes). Another student found that the loudness of plucked rubber bands was lessened when the bands were stretched over a plastic dustpan, as compared to over a metal cookie tin.
After ten minutes of group sharing these initial sounds and observations, Elizabeth opened the next round of experimenting, saying
After ten minutes of group sharing these initial sounds and observations, Elizabeth opened the next round of experimenting, saying
| "I encourage you to continue taking something further. Amplify it, extend it, change the sounds, see what you can modify, what that means. There are more materials, ask for things. I want everyone to have an experience with a tuning fork.” |
To set the tuning fork sounding, Elizabeth suggested striking it with a rubber mallet or against one’s hand; hitting it on a table or other rigid material could deform the fork.
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