Becca Price publishes “Songwriting to learn”

IAS faculty member Becca Price, along with Sarah Ward (UW College of Education), Katie Davis (UW iSchool), and Greg Crowther (UW Bothell School of STEM and Everett Community College), recently published "Songwriting to learn: how high school science fair participants use music to communicate personally relevant scientific concepts," a paper that describes the qualities of music that high school students wrote about scientific ideas. The students were all participating in the local BioExpo science fair. Their songs employed a number of musical elements to convey their passion for the science they were studying, extending beyond descriptive lyrics to include instrumentation, genre, and musical phrases that also reflected the content they were studying. The music also included stories about scientific discoveries and personal connections to the topics at hand.