WHAT: VOICES STEM Songwriting Contest

WHO: Open to all, especially student entries

DEADLINE: December 31, 2019. Submissions received before September 19 may be featured at the VOICES annual conference later that month.

From nursery rhymes to folk tunes to hymns, songs have been conveying culture, knowledge, and history since the dawn of human language. So why not lift your voice to teach science, technology, engineering, and math?

Mary McLellan does. The  Advanced Placement Statistics teacher at Aledo High School in Texas incorporates 50 songs into her curriculum. And as she explained in this video presentation sat the 2018 conference of VOICES (Virtual Ongoing Interdisciplinary Collaborations on Educating with Sound), her students find it helps them learn and use core concepts.

A 2018 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine consensus report on integrating the humanities in STEM found the approach has merit.

VOICES, which grew out of the National Science Foundation’s Project SMILES initiative to teach statistics through music, seeks to expand the nation’s STEM repertoire by sponsoring an annual songwriting contest.

The contest is open to all, with student entries especially encouraged.

The rules are simple: Find a news article or primary research paper about a new discovery or analysis in the realm of STEM (broadly defined). The source can be any newspaper, magazine, journal, or website post published whose publication date is June 2019 or more recent than that.

Write and perform a song or rap that (a) explains the new discovery/insight and (b) places it in the context of fundamental STEM principles/concepts.

Songs may be original or parodies. Deadline: December 31, 2019. Any outstanding entries received by September 19 may be featured at VOICES 2019!

Songs will be judged on their musicality (including prosody: how well the lyrics and music work together), effectiveness in communicating STEM ideas relevant to the assignment, age (older students are expected to produce better work), and group size (larger groups are expected to produce better work).

Questions about this contest may be sent to conference organizers Tiffany Getty (tiffany.getty@wilkes.edu) and Greg Crowther (gcrowther@everettcc.edu).

Filed under: For Teachers, K-12 Outreach Programs, Special Features

Tags: Competitions for Students, Contest, Contest for teachers, Curriculum, Programs for Teachers, STEAM, STEM education, STEM songwriting contest, VOICE virtual ongoing interdisciplinary collaborations on educating with song