Oak Forest HS Classes are Wired for Sound through Speaker Experiment

Oak Forest High School Freshman Alondra Padilla and Alexis Bautista work together to get their cup speaker working perfectly in their Integrated Physics class. The students are working together to try and figure out what parts of a homemade speaker make the speaker work and what does not make it work.

The two girls are students in Oak Forest High School teacher Vivian Turek’s Integrated Physics class. She said, “The lab was an exploratory lab in which the students got to test their knowledge of electrical currents, circuits, magnetism, and electricity to get a beginning understanding of the topic of waves.” Before students experienced their topic through class lectures and notes, they explored the topic through a hands-on laboratory experience.

Students realized there were many things they needed to understand better when they first started building their homemade speaker and so they researched how speakers work, what parts were needed to transfer sound from them and which of the provided materials would allow the sound produced to be the clearest and the loudest.

One of the hardest parts of the lab was getting the speaker to work correctly. Padilla and Bautista used their problem solving skills to figure out what parts would make the speaker work better. Padilla said, “I figured out it was not the magnets (that were making the speaker not function correctly), but that it was the wires. We switched them back and that made them work!” During the two days of building, students explored how variables changed would affect the clarity and volume and made adjustments accordingly. The variables in the girls’ experiment was coils and magnets.

Bautista likes these hands-on exploratory labs. “I learned to put the coils and magnets on the speaker to make them work. It was fun,” she said.

Ms. Turek said, “Overall more than half of all of the groups were successful in making a speaker from a disposable cup. Students will use this project to continue to build on their inquiry skills and in learning the main topics surrounding sound waves.”

Padilla said, “What I learned through this lab was how the way you connect things affect the way it works. It was fun to do this hands-on activity.”