Introducing SciTunes: Educational music videos for school science
This week I launched the first of five new music videos directly related to the secondary physics curriculum. As the others are released over the next few weeks, the Sci Song Guy blogs will be devoted to using songs for revision and in the classroom. The songs, which will cover particle theory, electricity, radioactivity, forces, and waves have been funded by the Stephen Hawking Foundation as part of their mission to improve science education and increase participation. I am extremely flattered that Professor Hawking saw the benefits of having songs in the classroom, and entrusted me to create them. I am also profoundly saddened that he will never be able to see the finished product.
The music videos have been made to a higher quality of production than the vast majority of educational music videos currently available online (I’m collaborating with the brilliant Trunkman Productions, responsible for the Cosmic Shambles Network who produce content for the likes of Brian Cox, Standup Maths, Robin Ince and Helen Czerski among others), and the videos will have been made according to the best research available. Some of this research comes from the academic literature on using songs for learning, and some of it comes from my own research in which I ran focus groups with students from a variety of schools and backgrounds. I also consulted teachers in person and through an online questionnaire. Teachers can still add to this research by following this link. It takes less than 5 minutes so please do add your opinion. I also have my own experience of using songs in the classroom to fall back on.
It is this experience of using song in the classroom that first encouraged me to embark on a mission to put the science curriculum into song. More specifically, it was my students. On occasion, I would play them my science songs as a treat at the end of term, but it was when they told me that these songs had helped them in tests that I began to take notice. I tried writing a song about EM Waves that was based entirely on learning objectives from the national curriculum. Despite the dryness of the source material, the students responded well. What was interesting was that the students that responded best were the ones who were usually the least engaged. The students in my lower ability classes and the girls who had been completely disengaged from physics came to life. They were soon demanding more, but recording songs and making decent videos to accompany them takes up far more time than a teacher can devote. Making high quality videos that are free for teachers and students was a major motivator for me to leave the classroom and the Stephen Hawking Foundation are making this dream a reality.
There are two main aims for this blog series. The first is to help teachers, feel more confident to bring songs into the classroom by giving them a solid theoretical basis for how and why to use them. The second is simply to collate all my research for posterity so that anyone interested in making their own educational science music videos can follow best practice and create useful, engaging videos too. The series will cover everything from the learning theories that support learning through song, to the activities that can best support their use in the classroom. There will be plenty of tips for teachers and ideas for starters, plenaries and revision lessons. As always, your feedback is really useful so please comment throughout with suggestions and thoughts.