Laser Laws

Hello and welcome back to my blog! I have just finished another scimatics project and I’m going to tell you all about it today. This post is all about my process of learning about lasers, the law of reflection, and The Pythagorean Theorem. For the first part of this blog post, I’m going to go over the core competencies that were involved in this project.

Competencies

Questioning and predicting:

This project used a lot of questioning and predicting, specifically during the planning of the final triangle design. We had to predict the exact angle that the law of reflection would imply. This competency was also specifically demonstrated during Milestone 1 when we created a mind map based off all the questions we had from the topics introduced to us. Here is a photo of my initial questions: 

Applying and innovating:

After the initial milestones, we completed multiple workbooks that taught us about the concepts such as the Pythagorean theorem, The law of reflection, and the properties of lasers. We applied all our knowledge in milestones such as 2, where we did a Khan academy quiz on The Pythagorean theorem and Milestone 3 where we did a lab experiment.

Project summary

to kick off this project, we made mind maps, as I mentioned earlier. There we wrote down lots of questions. For some question ideas, we got together in groups of 4 and brainstormed questions on a whiteboard. Then we went around to look at everyone’s white boards.

To complete this project easier, we had to gain a sustained knowledge of the topics at hand. That’s where the textbook and workbook pages come in. Through these, I gained a ton of knowledge about math and science concepts.

A milestone that particularly stood out to me was Milestone 4. This was an individual milestone and it kind of tied in a lot of the things we learned about previously. The task was to create a digital laser triangle display and create a lab report about it. Here is the document I created explaining my thoughts.

We used an online laser simulator to make triangles and make a possible plan for our group’s final project. In the end, we didn’t use my measurements but we made a similar triangle to the one I created.

The competencies involved in Milestone 4 were both questioning and predicting and applying and innovating. Here is the outline of the project included in the project plan:

The goal for this Milestone was to go for extending. At first, I got an accomplished but then I decided to use the Pythagorean theorem to measure the legs as well. I’m glad I did this because I found an error in my calculations so I fixed that. I turned the assignment in again and got an extending.

 

 

Making the display

For the final laser display, we were in groups of four. I was partnered with Brooke, Ariane, and Theryn. Together we decided that for our design, we wanted something simple and precise. Our initial plan was to have our triangle in the air but that didn’t work out so we had to abandon it after 2 hours of work. That was pretty frustrating but it’s all part of PLP. Then we came up with our final design.

A big part of the project was getting the measurements and the angles exact. We used the measuring app to find the lengths of each side. In addition to this, we also measured with a ruler to check for any errors we might have made. Another big part of coming up with the design was making sure that all the lengths followed the rules of the Pythagorean theorem. These were the calculations we made:

 

As you can see, there were some small errors we made that we quickly fixed.

You guys are probably tired of hearing about measurements and such, so I’ll show you some photos of our laser triangle with the smoke machine on.

We tried to make our project look more visually appealing by adding paint, glitter, and labels in metallic pen. Unfortunately we didn’t have a lot of time to decorate, as we had to start over as I previously. There were definitely prettier displays than ours but I think it turned out better than I expected! Whatever we lacked in aesthetic, I think we made up for with our precise measurements. Our triangle was an exact right triangle! (Also don’t worry, the lasers are harmless)

In the end, my group got extending on our final project which was super exciting!

 

Conclusions + answer to the driving questions

At the end of this project I went back to my mind map to answer some of my initial questions to prove my learning

The driving question for this project was “How can we test the Pythagorean theorem and the laws of reflection?”

the truth is, there’s not one answer to this question; you can answer it in many different ways. However the way we answered it was by making a laser triangle. I think this way was very effective for our learning, as it tied in both topics nicely.

That’s all for today’s blog post! I hope you enjoyed reading it!😎👉👉

Sincerely, Me