Upper St. Clair Students Build Guitars From Scratch

Imagine getting to build your own guitar from scratch as part of a school project. For Upper St. Clair High School students Mario Arjona, Greg Bennett, Yudi Chen, Dylan DeSantis, Catherine Groschner, Shane Heil and Suzanna Zak, that dream became a reality.

According to gifted teacher Marjie Heins and gifted teacher Connie Gibson, the idea for students building their own guitars is actually part of a Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) Guitar Project funded by the National Science Foundation, which is “designed to provide professional development to high school and college faculty.”

Originally, the project started at Purdue University before spreading to other colleges in the United States. Both teachers said they were inspired to learn more about the project when they saw the local administrator Mike Aiken, who is from Butler Community College, playing a guitar at the Carnegie Science Center’s Engineering Day.

The teachers applied and were chosen to be one of the first five teams to participate in an intense, five-day guitar design and building project-training session in the summer 2010.

During the session, they built their own custom electric guitars and participated in what they described as "student-centered learning activities that relate specifics of the guitar design and build to specific math, science and engineering topics."

When Heins and Gibson brought the guitar project to the high school as part of Heins’ Engineering Design and Fabrication class, they said, "Our goal is to find an exciting way to engage students, and increase their interest in the science, technology, engineering, arts and math (STEAM) subject areas.

“Ultimately, the curriculum will have students participating and engaging in several STEAM learning activities ranging from the science of sound and harmonics, to the engineering and manufacture of the guitar itself. We intend to expand this project over time, with the intent to foster and extend new thinking and interconnectedness of the various STEAM fields, using an innovative, new approach connecting various science and mathematics fields, with a hands-on, real-world application."

Students spent a minimum of 60 hours building their guitars, not including the hours spent for their lessons. They were graded on participation, total completion of the project and quality.

This was the first year for the guitar-building project and is likely to change as they further develop the program. In later years, Heins and Gibson envision adding a more traditional form of assessment for the classroom portion of the project, such as student quizzes.

"Teachers and students had an absolute blast," Heins and Gibson said.

The students showed a true passion working on their guitars. Even near the end of the school day, several of them were frantically trying to finish. As they were working, a few students shared their thoughts with me about the project.

Greg Bennett said he learned how to solder, how to use different tools needed to build the guitar and how to be more patient. Another quality he gained from his experience was “how to like pay more attention to details…from…an engineering standpoint, like the inner wirings how they all hook up.”

Mario Arjona said they worked on the project in a series of steps: “one week we would do like wiring and then we would be doing like the sanding for awhile” so they could “see how it all comes together in the finished product.”

Bennett, who plays the guitar, explained how it would have been a lot more expensive to buy a guitar and there was a real “sentimental value” to customizing his own.

Despite the long hours that went into building their guitars, both Bennett and Arjona really enjoyed the experience. After all, the sooner they finish their guitars, the sooner they can rock out.