School children explore music-making from variety of STEM areas

Repost from Campus Weekly

With support from Burroughs Welcome Fund, UNCG’s Music Research Institute and UNCG’s Center for New North Carolinians, the Guilford County School System’s McNair Elementary School and the Greensboro Science Center will partner to offer “UBEATS: A BioMusic STEM Intervention for ESL Students in Guilford County.” UBEATS will target recent immigrant students in grades 4-5 and 6-8 in structured informal learning environments with emerging interdisciplinary STEM content using cutting-edge, multimodal instruction grounded in creative uses of information and communication technologies. Students will be invited to explore music-making from a variety of STEM areas (e.g., biology, physics, animal communication, evolution, neuroscience, psychology) by using techniques that underscore connections between music and mind, body and the natural world. Strategic targeting of early adolescents at a time when they are beginning to weigh career choices, and when music permeates their perceptual world in and beyond school, offers opportunities to create resonance between STEM fields, the natural world, the pervasive presence of music technology, and cyber-learning environments.