The idea of the Independent Study Period is one that caught my fancy from the very first time I was invited to participate in it. I have myself always found that while conventional text-book centered learning has its own value, the idea of project-based learning is a far more potent tool to facilitate real and enduring learning. What attracts me about it the most is the idea that all the participants in the process learn independently. This is not to say that they do not work together. In fact, collaborative work is at the crux of ISP.

Our everyday experiences are inevitably collaborative - we must interact with our peers, in some way or to some degree, in order to achieve everything, right from basic survival all the way up to sophisticated endeavours in the sciences or the arts. Learning is an inherent, inseparable, crucial component of all of these process. We learn in our daily lives because we have to - it is what allows us to function, to adapt and to achieve our everyday goals. ISP as I have understood it, tries to mirror this organic process of learning, where we work together but learn for ourselves. It does not treat learning as a deliberate, sequential, artificial ‘method’.

ISP creates situations in which participants have solve problems collaboratively. Learning is an inevitable outcome of this activity. To illustrate, my own course, ‘the Science of Musical Instruments’ asks students to construct fully functional musical instruments out of scrap wood, trash and other everyday material. I don’t give them an instruction manual - I only put them in groups, set the context for them and provide them with tools.

The students decide what instruments they want to build and how they are going to go about it. Now, in order to actually achieve their goal of building a working musical instrument, it becomes a necessity for them to learn about a wide variety of principles and, simultaneously, to apply those principles as they learn them. They have to learn about concepts from music theory such as, consonance, dissonance, octave relationships and timbre; they have to relate all of that knowledge with concepts from acoustical physics like pitch-frequency relationships, the harmonic content of tone, nodes, antinodes, standing waves, resonance and energy transfer and then they have to apply that information (or discover it through their unknowing application of it) by learning tool usage and woodworking. In my experience, the entire process gives them a very real, tangible idea of what these phenomena are in a way that a textbook often cannot. There is another side to ISP that is important to me, which is the fact that the student group is interdisciplinary. Over the last three years that I have been conducting this course, I have invariably seen stereotypes, particularly those relating to gender (girls are better at design and guys at tools) and discipline (the engineers should build and the rest of them should decorate or play) utterly break down so that students begin to see each other as individuals rather than as categories.

Importantly, each student takes something different away from the course. And, of course, ending the course with a hand-crafted wooden marimba, a surprisingly resonant violin, a fun set of bongo drums or a mini steel-tube piano is an exceptionally fulfilling feeling!