Standing waves on holidays

Abstract

Abstract Standing waves are a common phenomenon in nature, but sometimes difficult to understand by the students. Many of them do not realise, for example, that the sound coming from the musical instruments is due to standing waves that are formed in strings, membranes, or cavities on those instruments. In this paper, we describe a simple activity that occurred in a circular pool during holidays which excited people for generating standing waves with their own body. This was also an opportunity for talking about this phenomenon with young people and make simple calculations of the speed of waves in shallow water. This is an example that summertime is not just for relaxing and teachers may find good examples of applied physics to bring to their classes and help students to better understand physics contents.