Shape Beats: Area Edition

In this activity, students get to think of area as sound, or taking up a certain amount of time. We start by asking students to make as many sounds of the same length as they can, where each sound has a different shape. Then we assemble areas using different sized tiles, and finally we complete a set of rhythmic challenges where you have to recreate a given rhythm with chunks of area of different sizes. The ratios between the areas underlies why they create different rhythms when turned into sound/time.

By Gabriel Turow