1. Learning STEM Subjects Through Guitar Making Mark French – Purdue University Scot Rabe – Ventura College

2. Guitars can be a great inspiration for learning in formal academic environments

3. Broadly, there are two kinds of guitars: Acoustic and Electric The STEM lessons that emerge from guitar making depend, in part on which kind of instrument you are working with Just about any stringed instrument will work – guitar, ukulele, dulcimer, whatever A Nice Stick with Strings A Nice Box of Air with Strings

4. A Guitar Doesn’t Need To Be Magnificent To Be A Good Learning Tool

5. Very Simple Instruments will Work Fine if Resources are Limited A long as the basic components are there, STEM lessons can be supported by the simplest of instruments Even electric guitars can be very simple Single pickup Limited electronics A Diddley Bow Bo Diddley – Something Altogether Different

6. Sample – How Does the Sound Get from the String to My Ear? Following energy through the system can teach students to think of all electro- mechanical systems in a logical way The components involved are familiar and accessible A pickup senses the string motion and converts it to a proportional voltage Rick Nielsen plucks a string on his crazy 5 neck guitar An effects box modifies the electrical signal to make it more gnarly Finally, an amplifier adds power to the electrical signal and sends it to a speaker. Your ear senses the pressure waves in the air and turns them back into electrical signals in the auditory nerves

7. Don’t Shy Away from the Electronics Ears (especially teenaged ones) are very good sensors and they are very good at evaluating signals that have been turned into sounds. Information about how strings vibrate is encoded in the output signal. Easy to record output using Audacity and to identify string frequencies. From gmarts.org A web site worth visiting

8. I have Audacity, Octave and Matlab, so I can do lots of cool signal processing. I can calculate sound quality of a guitar, right? An actual bottle of mojo

9. No