Recently, I had the idea to do a theme of "song lengths" over at Estimation 180. Inspired by a recent comment from Fawn, I chose Santana's Oye Como Va. At first, I opened up iTunes and took a screen shot of the music player. I threw in an album cover and edited it to look like this, asking "How long is Santana's Oye Como Va?":
I can get away with directly asking the question at Estimation 180. How would you make your estimate? I'd make my estimate based on the time played so far (1:26) and the location of the playhead in the timeline. I absolutely love that students have to use time here, specifically 60 seconds in a minute. Furthermore, I'm hoping students use some type of spatial reasoning with the timeline, either as a fraction, percentage, proportion, or something else. But that's it. Can we go anywhere else with this? This task feels constrained. This doesn't capture the medium of music correctly. There's got to be more, right?
The more I thought about it, I was curious of better ways (or the best way) to capture time and music. Let me rephrase that. If I were going for a more perplexing approach and wanted to create a 3 Act task to share at 101qs.com, how would I go about doing that? I remembered that I own the djay app and experimented with a really lengthy Jethro Tull song titled, Thick As A Brick. This is where I need your help. I'd appreciate you checking out Act 1 and letting me know the first question that comes to mind. Or watch it here and leave a comment/question in the comments.
Based on some initial questions, I'm thinking of revising Act 1 where the virtual record player looks more like this. (notice the record?)
The virtual record player opens up many possibilities with this task. There's a white tape marker on the record for precise tracking when playing the track. I feel there's a lot more math opportunities here, but at the same time it feels a little contrived?
Am I over-thinking this?
What do you see here?
What are your thoughts?
I need some help. Thanks in advance.
Spin it,
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