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Sound Cups gets to the heart of thinking like a scientist. This Snack encourages participants to ask questions, carry out investigations, and use their senses to find a person whose Sound Cup matches theirs, and together recreate the sounds they hear.
Note: This activity works best in large groups of 10 or more people. The amount of materials needed will depend on the size of the group.
Each participant will need one Sound Cup, and every Sound Cup will need a match within the group.
Note: If you find yourself running out of unique sound-making objects, you can add variety by making one matched pair from a single paper clip, for example, and another from 5 paper clips, and so on.
To begin, have participants each choose a red Sound Cup. Ask people to gently shake the cup they’ve chosen and try to find the person who has a cup that sounds the same. If you want, you can instruct the group to do this exploration without speaking—the sounds of the cups should guide participants to find a match within the group. If participants have trouble finding a match, ask all unpaired people to raise their hands so that they can narrow their possibilities. It is ok if someone ends up with a partner that is not a perfect match.
Once participants have made their best attempts to find their correct partners, have pairs work together to try to build an identical Sound Cup using the materials provided on the trays. No fair looking inside their red cups! They need to build their own blue ones (or whatever two colors of cups you’ve used) by sound only.
Finally, bring the whole group together to share their processes and their findings. Have each pair present their work, demonstrating the sounds of the original cups one at a time, and then the sound of their reconstructed cup. What process did the presenters use to make their own Sound Cup? How well did they match the sound? What do people notice?
At the end of their explorations, many people will want to know if they were “right.” Do not open them up, and instead use the opportunity to emphasize an important principle: In science, it often isn’t possible to appeal to a higher authority or look inside the object we are observing. Instead, we must rely on our own observations and investigations to answer our questions. This is an essential part of the scientific process.
Sound Cups present an excellent opportunity to think like a scientist. Given the problem of finding the Sound Cup that matches yours, you start using your senses—your sense of hearing and your sense of touch—to make observations. As soon as you shake or rattle your Sound Cup, you are carrying out an investigation, gathering data, and analyzing your results. Plastic cups make wonderfully resonant chambers, allowing simple objects to sound very mysterious. Only through careful observation will partners be able to find each other and then make a matching Sound Cup.
This activity works well in a science classroom and can be used to randomly group students into pairs. At the Exploratorium, we like to use this activity at the start of the school year, asking students to introduce his/her Sound Cup partner as part of a “getting to know you” activity. If there are any issues, you should be able to look at the codes to help partners find one another.
If you want to evaluate aspects of this activity, here are a few points to consider:
If you want to add a writing component to these investigations, you can have each student write about the sound that their cup made:
You might also ask them to write about their experiences:
This Snack was adapted from an original activity created by Mike Petrich and Karen Wilkinson of the Exploratorium’s Tinkering Studio.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Attribution: Exploratorium Teacher Institute