Successful sound experiment at Ullevi Stadium
400 upper primary school pupils took to the football pitch at Ullevi Stadium on 17 April to explore how sound waves propagate. It was also the kickoff for this year’s International Science Festival.
AFTER AN OLYMPIC-STYLE parade around Ullevi Stadium’s running track, with each school class lined up neatly behind their placard, it was time to start the day’s physics lesson. As a warm-up, the pupils were asked to form the flags of Ukraine and Sweden by turning up either the blue or yellow side of the panels they were holding.
Despite this rather unusual classroom, the pupils took their jobs very seriously and took down the panels they had been given at lightning speed when they heard the sound from the loudspeakers as instructed by the researchers leading the experiments.
“I’m very happy with today’s experiments. 400 pupils are not quite enough to cover every inch of the football pitch, but the effects of the sounds will show up well on the drone film,” says Javier Marmolejo, one of the two researchers from the University of Gothenburg who guided the pupils through the various experiments with the aid of a large number of volunteer physics students.
THE POSITIONS OF THE pupils on the pitch and when they raised their panels was best seen from a bird’s eye view, so the whole experiment was filmed with a drone and shown to the pupils on a big screen during the breaks. All participating classes also took a copy of the film home with them.
“It’s great fun to involve schoolchildren and important to get them interested in science at an early age. We need more scientists to take on the challenges we’ll be facing in the future,” says Dag Hanstorp, Professor at the Department of Physics.
THE PURPOSE OF THE experiments was to actively and visually demonstrate what sound is and how we humans perceive the different properties of sound. The pupils got to see how fast sound travels and how sound waves can interfere with each other to either amplify or diminish the sound. They also got to try a statistics experiment involving tossing a coin a large number of times.
Text: Olof Lönnehed
Photo: Peter Kvarnström, Johan Wingborg, Olof Lönnehed