The Monster Music game addresses students’ common and persistent misconception that electricity is a substance, like water that flows through a pipe. Flipping an on/off switch, then, is like turning a faucet on or off: It starts or stops the electricity from continuing to flow, but the electricity is still in the wire. The purpose of the Monster Music digital game is to help students visualize a counterintuitive scientific idea. In this case, it is to allow students to imagine electricity as a form of energy that moves through space—not like a substance, by traveling from one place to another, but by a process of alignment—creating a pattern from which a powerful form of energy emerges.
Monster Music can be used with subtopics associated with electricity: matter and energy, charge and flow, pattern and alignment, and electricity and circuits. Explanations and support materials for these are available on the Curricular Connections page.
