Making M Music w with Mathematics
Maria Lorelei Fernández, Maria Lorelei Fernández · 1999
Have you ever wondered how to bring music into your mathematics lessons? Music can be a rich context for facilitating mathematical connections. However, for those of us who are not musically inclined, encouraging mathematical connections through music can seem overwhelming. The following tasks are a way to bring music into your classroom with rewarding results. I have used these mathematics tasks with high school students, as well with as preservice and in-service teachers. Students become engaged in problem-solving and reasoning tasks as they determine how to fill bottles with water to create musical notes by blowing across the tops of the bottles and as they create mathematical models that represent these notes. In addition to discussing the tasks, this article presents examples of students’ work from these experiences and describes mathematics and physics concepts related to these tasks.