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Teaching with Song in STEM

1. STEM Karaoke & Performance

Educators (and/or their students) can sing STEM songs to live or karaoke accompaniment in classroom or informal education settings.

Louisiana high school teacher Kristin Chavis uses rap to help students learn biology

Source: https://abcnews.go.com/Lifestyle/high-school-biology-teacher-rhymes-raps-teach/story?id=46773632


Texas high school teacher Mary McLellan uses karaoke in her AP statistics class

Other Resources

 

2. Songs & Videos as a Learning Resource

Large curated searchable databases of songs for teaching statistics and other STEM subjects are available and often contain supplemental materials for using them in computer labs or for homework assignments.

The P-Value Song

By: Michael Greenacre (Barcelona Graduate School of Economics)


AstroCappella – A Musical Exploration of the Universe!

AstroCappella

Astronomy songs with activities by the a capella group The Chromatics.

Other Resources

 

3. Songs with Integrated Activities

Online songs can be integrated into a web app that asks for students to respond to prompts before and/or after the song to reinforce the learning objectives of the song.

Overview of NSF award-winning Project SMILES


The SMILES Library of 28 songs

Project SMILES

Other Resources

 

4. Student Projects

Even more student-driven is having students synthesize and demonstrate understanding of content by writing their own songs (with scaffolded support) or doing analysis or making a video of an existing song.

eCOTS video poster on undergrad student-created songs


VOICES video poster on high school chemistry song project

Another Idea

Point students to a song (or a choice of songs) in the CAUSEweb.org/fun library and ask them to prepare a slide presentation which advances in time to the song to illustrate the song’s statistical concepts. Examples of this type of slide-show video include:

 

5. Overall References on Fun in Statistics

https://www.causeweb.org/cause/resources/fun/references