Since 2013, this cross-disciplinary collaboration between our Music and Science Departments has been delighting the Hillbrook community and we are happy to share that this year’s Hillbrook Sound Project has kicked off!
The Hillbrook Sound Project challenges students to create an original instrument using found objects while giving them a deeper, hands-on learning experience into the science of sound as well as composition principles in music and art. This project also connects students to a greater community of scientists, musicians, and artists who create with found objects in the real world.
This project also gives students as well as teachers an opportunity to collaborate 
and strengthens students’ confidence as reflection and choice are essential to this fully integrated deep-learning experience. Beyond their time at Hillbrook, our students are poised to flourish in any collaborative project they take on.
In the greater Bay Area, the Hillbrook Sound Project has been making (sound) waves! Curators of the project, 3rd/4th Grade Science Teacher Jenny Jones and Lower School Music Teacher Kristin Engineer, took their findings and their experiences to FabLearn 2015, a conference of educators and thinkers set on the campus of Stanford University. (On an additional note, Hillbrook 5th grade Science Teacher and iLab/MakerSpace Coordinator Christa Flores ran this incredibly engaging summit! Click here to read her blog, Making@Hillbrook.)
“Our project and poster demo caught the attention of administrators and teachers from other schools in the Bay Area and from around the world,” says Engineer. “We were proud to showcase and share out to the greater academic community some of the collaborative maker work that Hillbrook has embraced.”
Last year’s Sound Projects were built around donated bicycles and this year, the students will be crafting their found instruments based on wheelbarrows.
Watch this year’s Sound Project joyously kick off in a recent Community Sing session:
You can read Jones’s and Engineer’s academic paper on the success of their project there. To learn more about the Hillbrook Sound Project and to get a peek into the latest updates as they embark on this year’s creations, visit the HB Sound Project blog.
As a school, we endlessly encourage our community to champion new and effective ways to create extraordinary, hands-on educational experiences that enrich each of our students’ educations and lives both here at Hillbrook and beyond.