Using the History of the Electric Guitar to Teach Electromagnetism

MICHAEL LUKIE1, DON METZ2 1 Collegiate Division, University of Winnipeg, 2Faculty of Education, University of Winnipeg
CONTEXTUAL TEACHING STRATEGY (continued)
The lessons culminated in students building an electric guitar and pickup.

INTRODUCTION
Recently, attention has been given to the principle of student engagement in schools. Student engagement according to Willms, Friesen, & Milton (2009) is how students participate in academic and non-academic activities at school, and to what extent they make a serious personal investment in their learning. They suggest that student intellectual engagement is a serious emotional and cognitive investment in learning using higher-order thinking skills such as analysis and evaluation. The research by Willms et al. indicates that levels of participation in academic engagement fall steadily from grade 6 to grade 12, while intellectual engagement falls during the middle school years and remains at a low level throughout secondary school. To increase student intellectual engagement, Dunleavy & Milton (2009) suggest providing students with authentic learning opportunities while Stinner (1994) suggests that there is strong evidence indicating that learning methods embedded in a context are essential. Guided by these recommendations this research study uses a contextual teaching approach illustrating the history of the electric guitar through a science story, and the building of an electric guitar and pickup. Our goal was to increase student engagement compared to a more traditional textbook centred approach to learning physics.

STUDENT ATTITUDES
Non-contextual Lessons In general, half of the students referenced the textbook approach as boring and comments reflected the low level of intellectual engagement found in the study. "The textbook doesn't explain how or why formulas work as they do, Student so there is no meaning to the equation W=Fd and it is difficult to Comments understand." "I hate the textbook, working on the textbook is boring." Contextual Lessons These lessons used a combination of historical story, demonstrations, and hands on activities. The most positive comments came from students after the guitar pickup was built. "I loved everything, this was the highlight of this school year. It showed me how I can use electromagnetism at home." Student Comments "I enjoyed how hands-on this lesson was. It was fun to build something." Students especially liked how all the electromagnetism concepts were brought together in the pickup construction. "The hands-on activity of building the guitar pickup related all of the Student concepts we've been learning about." Comments "I liked that we got to play with the magnets ourselves to really see the magnitude of B due to different actions." Many students were interested in the lessons since the topic related to their own lives, some students were musicians and played guitar while others simply liked to listen to music. "It interested me because I like music and building things and learning Student things in creative ways. This is the BEST way to learn physics." Comments "Guitars are something I enjoy and the fact that relates to them was cool." A clear majority of students wrote that they were especially interested in the history of the electric guitar lesson. "Learning about the history of the guitar and how electromagnetic pickups work was very interesting, especially considering the fact that Student I play guitar as well." Comments "This lesson was more interesting than the other 2. First, it was presented in an original way (without just reading the textbook and doing practice questions). Second, the topic was unique and I found the history of the guitar to be more interesting."

History of the Electric Guitar

The motivation behind the invention of the electric guitar was the need to increase the volume of the guitar. As musical performances moved to increasingly larger public spaces in the late 19th and early 20th century, the size of musical ensembles grew correspondingly and guitar musicians required more volume so that they could be heard. A series of design innovations have been incorporated into the acoustic guitar that are important for more volume. Innovation 1: Innovation 2: Innovation 3: X-bracing, introduced by Carved arched guitar Coil wound nonChristian Frederick Martin in top, developed by Orville electromagnetic the 1850's as a structural Gibson around 1890. pickup, developed by support for the interior body Gibson engineer Lloyd of the guitar. Loar in 1924.

METHODOLOGY
The research compared two different instructional delivery methods for student intellectual engagement. A non-contextual teaching approach using a textbook to teach the work outcomes for the mechanics unit and a contextual teaching approach where students built an electric guitar pickup and a simple guitar in order to facilitate teaching the electromagnetism outcomes of the electricity unit. To measure student engagement, student-generated questions were collected following different instructional activities for each instructional episode. The questions were categorized and ranked to judge the degree of student engagement and depth of thought using a framework where numerical values were assigned to questions which were either, peripheral, factual, conceptual or philosophical in nature. Additionally, after each lesson, students recorded in their student journals their own assessment of their level of engagement and their attitudes to the method of the instructional delivery. They were asked to answer the following: What did you like? What did you not like? Comment on the way the lesson was presented. Comment on your level of engagement. Comment on how the lesson interested you. Finally, a formal paper-pencil test was given after each instructional method and mathematical problems related to the laws and formulas presented were formally assessed.

Innovation 4: Metal body guitar body with resonating cones, developed by John Dopyera in 1925.

Innovation 5: Increased guitar size. The Dreadnought acoustic guitar was introduced in 1930 by Martin guitars.

1931

Beauchamp develops the first electromagnetic pickup consisting of a pair of horseshoe magnets. 1932 Beauchamp develops the first electric guitar did not believe it would work so Beauchamp had to take a band to the patent office to play the guitar and prove his invention was functional. 1941 Les Paul experimented with the solid body electric guitar by stringing a 4x4 inch piece of solid pine and attaching it to a Gibson neck. 1952 Leo Fender introduces the Telecaster, the first mass produced electric guitar. 1952 Ted McCarty of Gibson introduces an electric guitar endorsed by Les Paul. The top was painted gold to disguise the maple top and mahogany body. Fender introduces the Stratocaster with 3-single coil pickups and a custom contoured body. The history and invention of the electric guitar is a story about solving the problem to the question of how to increase guitar volume. The electric guitar pickup was the solution and it ultimately involved the physics of electromagnetism.

DATA ANALYSIS
Metz, D. and Lukie, M. (2013). In search of student engagement in high school physics through contextual teaching. Proceedings of the 12th Biennial International History, Philosophy and Science Teaching (IHPST) Conference , Pittsburgh, USA, June 19-22 2013. Presented Friday June 19, 4-5:30PM Gold Room.

CONCLUSION
This study provides physics teachers with an alternative instructional strategy for teaching electromagnetism that is demonstrated to be intellectually engaging to students. Students produced questions with a higher degree of depth of thought, self-reported a higher degree of engagement, and reported positive student attitudes with respect to the contextual approach to learning. Additionally, while student achievement was maintained students can be expected to carry a continued and more informed positive view of science into the future. The contextual activity is significant because it fosters positive attitudes with and between students when they worked co-operatively in groups to exchange ideas about how to solve the problem of building the electric guitar and electric guitar pickup.
SELECTED REFERENCES
Klassen, S., Metz, D., McMillan, B., & Scramstad, C. (2011, in press). A framework for student questions in the science classroom. Metz, D. (2007). We now interrupt the story: Mediating student learning using historical stories, A paper presented at the Ninth International History, Philosophy and Science Teaching Conference, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada. June 24-28, 2007. Smith, M. (2004). The electric Guitar. How we got from Andres Segovia to Kurt Cobain. Invention and Technology Magazine, 1(20),Summer 2004. Stinner, A.: 1994, Providing a contextual base and a theoretical structure to guide the teaching of high school physics. Physics Education, 29, 375381. Willms, J. D., Friesen, S. & Milton, P. (2009). What did you do in school today? Transforming classrooms through social, academic and intellectual engagement. (First National Report). Toronto: Canadian Education Association.

CONTEXTUAL TEACHING STRATEGY

In this set of lessons, a door-opening story about the history of the invention of the electric guitar was used to stimulate student interest and to provide the context and motivation to study electromagnetism. Students worked through a number of activities and demonstrations associated with electromagnetism including the modeling of an electric guitar pickup using a solenoid, permanent magnet, and metal rod.

1954

m.lukie@uwinnipeg.ca

d.metz@uwinnipeg.ca