Activity (Hands-On)Grades 3 - 5
Make Some Waves
In this activity, students use their own creativity (and their bodies) to make longitudinal and transverse waves. Through the use of common items, they will investigate the difference between longitudinal and transverse waves.
Students investigate longitudinal and transverse wavesCopyright 2006 Microsoft Corporation, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052-6399 USA. All rights reserved.
Waves are used for many reasons in our society: sonar, reading glasses, light bulbs, stereo equipment and lasers all rely on either sound or light waves. For engineers to develop new (and already used) technology, they must understand how light and sound waves work and how to use them in new devices.
After this activity, students should be able to:
- Explain what a longitudinal wave is and give an example.
- Explain what a transverse wave is and give an example.
- Create plots of sin and cosine wave functions (if using extension activity)