Penn State acoustic wave (PAW) kits: Development of “at-home” hands-on activities for first-year graduate level acoustics courses

Abstract

Faculty in the Graduate Program in Acoustics at Penn State have often used in-class physical demonstrations to illustrate acoustic and vibration phenomena when teaching first year graduate students. During the Fall 2020 semester, when physical demonstrations were more difficult due to courses being moved online during COVID-19, we began including open-ended extra credit hands-on problems asking student to use household items to explore fundamental concepts. We observed that students who completed these extra credit experiments showed greater understanding of the material on homework assignments and exams than those who did not. Upon returning to in-person instruction for our first-year graduate courses, ACS 501 (Elements of Acoustics and Vibration) and ACS 502 (Elements of Waves in Fluids), we began developing a set of PAW (PSU Acoustic Wave) Kits that will allow all of our students—both resident and online—the opportunity to enhance their critical thinking in acoustics through inquiry-based learning. These PAW Kits will contain items not commonly found “at home” (masses, springs, dashpots, membranes, accelerometers, short pipes, lapel microphones, etc.), with the goal of at least one inquiry-based activity per major topic. This paper will describe some of the hands-on activities we are developing and testing.