‘Cups,’ the ‘Pitch Perfect’ patty-cake game that’s gone viral in the schoolyard

Ugh, those cups. Several months ago, Diedre Neal, the sixth-grade assistant principal at Alice Deal Middle School, started noticing them all over the cafeteria. During lunch, the children — notably the girls — were clapping their hands, beating out a rhythm on upturned plastic cups, then flipping them over and slamming them onto the table. Over and over again.

Clap, clap, ba-da-boom, boom, boom, slam. Boom slam. Boom slam.

“Put them away,’’ Neal would say, annoyed by the racket. It didn’t help. If they didn’t have cups, the girls hammered out the rhythm with their fists. Or on empty yogurt containers. Neal soon realized the girls weren’t just being just rambunctious — they were all banging out the same pattern, singing the same song.

“When I’m gone, when I’m gone, you’re gonna miss me when I’m gone . . .”

A new hand-clapping game — similar to schoolyard classics such as “Miss Mary Mack” and “Slide” and “Down by the Banks” — was spreading through the school. It was being transmitted from student to student, face to face, as in the old days. Inside of a week, the rhythm became ubiquitous.

The flulike spread of “Cups” allowed Neal to experience something that social scientists are just beginning to understand. The games are encoded with sociocultural significance, said Elizabeth Tucker, a folklorist and English professor at Binghamton University in New York. They have existed since at least the late 19th century, and their functions include teaching dexterity and serving as tools for forming friendships. And somehow, new research is showing, these primitive clapping and chanting games have endured around the world, despite competition from hand-held technology.

Before Cups, Neal said she hardly ever saw hand games at Deal, a 1,200-student school that has clubs for everything from board games to Rubik’s Cubes.

“What we see are Kindles,’’ Neal said.

Until now. The game’s swift ascendancy at Deal suggests an alternative theory: Technology might not be what kills hand-clapping games. Instead it could be what saves them.

Kyra Gaunt, a social science professor at Baruch College in New York, researches hand games. There are so many distractions these days, Gaunt said, that hand games are harder for children to master. And as playtime has become more structured — soccer leagues and play dates — students are discovering them in different ways, through Web searches or in music classes.

The history of Cups at Deal Middle School, researched with a bunch of 11-year-olds over apple slices and hot dogs in a single lunch period:

It starts with Adam:

“I learned it because I liked the beat. I was taught by this girl named Libya.”

Libya could not be reached for comment, because she was out playing.

False start.

Edmee learned it from Suzanna. And Suzanna, she thinks, learned it from Sophie. And Sophie learned it from Anne. And they all saw Jalen doing it.

Says Jalen Ciagne, 11, “I saw it in the movie, ‘Pitch Perfect,’ and I thought it was really cool.’’

“Pitch Perfect,” a 2012 comedy about a female college a cappella team competing for a national title, came out last fall and was released on DVD in December. It was not long after the DVD release that Neal starting seeing all those cups.