Think to yourself about how you think reflection works. It might be simpler than you think. The law of reflection is based on on angles which you can use a protractor. Say a laser beam hit a mirror on a 105 degree angle. As you can see in the photo below there is a perpendicular line from the point where the beam hit the mirror. There are the same amount of degrees from either beam to the perpendicular line. Which in turn proves the law of reflection.
That is one part of this project. The other is the Pythagorean theorem. The length of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the lengths of the other sides. It is mathematically stated as c2 = a2 + b2, where c is the length of the hypotenuse and a and b the lengths of the other two sides.
My mind map for the end of the project
This project was about how we can test the Pythagorean theorem and the law of reflection and we tested it by using Pythagorean theorem and the law of reflection to make a right angle triangle with a one beam of light, mirrors, a protractor to measure the degree of the reflection, and a ruler to figure out the hypotenuse
Then we used real lasers an mirrors to create a shape. After we made our model we used a smoke machine to show the path of the lasers which was really cool!
Here is our laser display with the smoke!:
See you next time.