Hi! For scimatics we just finished our laser laws project. This was a very interesting project where we learned about the law of reflection and the Pythagorean theorem. The driving question of this project was “How can we test the Pythagorean theorem and law of reflection?” and we broke this project down into 5 milestones.
Milestone 1
Milestone 1 was “What do I already know about light and what do I need to know to do this project well?”. To answer this we made a mind map. In the mind map we wrote what we already knew about light & lasers and any question we had. Here is my mind-map.
Milestone 2
For this milestone the question we answered was “How does light behave in predictable ways?” For this we did a lab report on an experiment we did. In the experiment we had a small laser/light and we pointed it at a mirror and wrote about how it reflected. Some terms we learned in this section were
Normal: A line perpendicular to the plain that the light is reflecting off of.
Line of incident: The line of light that hits the plain first.
Line of reflection: The line of light that reflects off the plain.
Angle of incident: The angle between the line of incident and the normal.
Angle of reflection: The angle between the normal and the line of reflection (this angle is the same as the angle of incident)
Here is the lab report I wrote
Milestone 3
In milestone 3 we answered the question “How are the sides of right triangles related?”. For this section we did a lot of textbooks about the Pythagorean theorem. The Pythagorean theorem is A squared + B squared = C squared. You can use the Pythagorean theorem to find the missing side of a right triangle. Another thing we learned about in Milestone 3 was Pythagorean triples. The most famous Pythagorean triple is 3 squared, 4 squared and 5 squared because if you square 3 and square 4 it equals 9+16 which equals 25 and 25 is 5 squared. There are lots of other Pythagorean triples. You can use these to see if a triangle is a right triangle.
Milestone 4
In milestone 4 we answered “How can we design a laser display that tests the Pythagorean theorem and the law of reflection?”. For this we used an app were we could make a simulation of a laser display. Then we made a lab report to try to prove the Law of Reflection and Pythagorean theorem. Here is my lab report
Milestone 5
The last milestone we answered was “How can we build a laser display that tests the Pythagorean theorem and the law of reflection?”. This was our final product for the whole project. We had to make a real life laser display using mirrors and a small non powerful laser. We presented this by putting smoke so you could see the laser display. The display that we tried to make was a right angle triangle to show what we learned about the Pythagorean theorem. Here are some pictures we took of our display.
Curricular competency
This section is about the rubric of the project (what we were meant to do). The first curricular competency is Questioning and predicting: Demonastre a sustained intellectual curiosity about a scientific topic or problem of personal interest. I think I did ok for this because I was able to ask a lot of questions and I was very into this project. I also handed all my work in on time.
The second curricular competency is Communicating and Representing: Represents mathematical ideas in concrete, pictorial and symbolic forms. I think I did really good on this curricular competency because I understood all the math and made sure to show the process of my work.
The last curricular competency is Applying and innovating: Co-operatively design projects. For this curricular competency I feel like I did ok, but I could improve on helping my team mates more and contributing more ideas.
Thanks for reading. Have a good day!