Keeping Time to Music

The engineering design challenge is to create a device that will keep time to a popular song. There is a lot of background information in this article and excellent discussion of how to dea... See More

The engineering design challenge is to create a device that will keep time to a popular song. There is a lot of background information in this article and excellent discussion of how to deal with misconceptions in force and motion. But as a reviewer I feel there was an important part left out - pictures and illustrations!! These would have helped visualize what was being described and lead a teacher to use this material in their own classroom.

Time Challenge

This would be an interesting challenge to put to my middle school Design and Engineering students. I like the idea of the challenge, but am wondering how many solutions there are. Immediat... See More

This would be an interesting challenge to put to my middle school Design and Engineering students. I like the idea of the challenge, but am wondering how many solutions there are. Immediately my mind went to pendulums, though I don’t know how you could keep the pendulum swinging throughout the entire song. The other thought was a metronome type of device, which would be more challenging for students to figure out how to construct. The advantage would be, once you had the mechanical piece working, it would not, or at least should not decay over time. I would have liked to have seen some actual photos of completed student designs created for this challenge. I would also have liked to see some sort of rubric for scoring and questions that might be posed to students as they went through the challenge, both to move progress forward and cause students to think about the process as well as the science behind their solutions.