The context of a guitar or other string instrument will trigger the student to do their own investigations. What knowledge is required to build a guitar? Which physical laws are there to keep in mind when building a guitar? To get to know this, students analyse the playing of a double bass and the frets on a guitar. The knowledge gathered in these activities is applied to the new context of air columns in wind instruments.
The main IBSE approach in this subunit are guided discovery and open inquiry.
Inquiry based skills developed in this unit are amongst others:
- Performing experiments.
- Analyzing results obtained with experiments (or presented by the teacher).
- Communicating results with the use of graphs.
- Using results from one experiment (double bass) to analyze the results of another experiment (frets of a guitar).
- Using knowledge from one field of acoustics (strings) in another field of acoustics (air columns).
In some activities the computer is used to record sound and to analyse the data..