Middle School

Songs can be effective in engaging children with science. Tweens (children aged 8 to 12) are in an important preadolescent phase where individual interests are thought to be established. This study aims to determine if songs can help teachers to engage their tween-aged students with science. A review of the songs currently available to help teachers in Australia engage tweens with science was conducted. Few songs were found that were directed at tweens and most were aimed at content knowledge rather than engagement.

The video poster will be a brief outline of a project funded by the Stephen Hawking Foundation to create five music videos about high school physics. Research was done prior to their creation to inform the best approach to the song writing, video production, and accompanying resources and evaluation was conducted on the efficacy of the videos and their appeal to students and teachers.

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The presentation will demonstrate the use of music to introduce beginning statistics topics, using an "oldie but goodie" song. The demonstration illustrates how to engage students actively in counting, frequency tables, and graphs - counting words, phrases or musical beats; recording these; and creating graphs to display the generated data. Then, the activity examines using a more recent song appropriate for grade levels 6 – 10 (depending on course set-up) or pre-service teachers to create a frequency table and graph of the data.

Understanding the three types of heat transfer and the rule of heat flow is paramount to mastery of thermodynamics. How can 6th graders master these concepts? Of course, sing about them. Seeing an obvious witty connection to use CCR to teach CCR terms, veteran middle school physical science teacher Jessica Levine created her first parody song for her students. This video poster presentation will include philosophy for engaging middle level students with songs for science content, and why this methodology sticks.