What Was This Project❓

The driving question that we would try to answer throughout this project is “How can we test the Pythagorean theorem and the law of reflection?”. To do this we made our own displays that used the law of reflection as well as the Pythagorean theorem.

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What Did This Project Include 🗂

Milestone 1

In milestone 1 we creates mind maps to figure out what things we knew about light and what were some of the questions we had. I had a total of 17 questions and 6 knows. I think that this was a helpful step to see just how much I didn’t know yet, which was a lot. By the end of this project I believe that most of the things I didn’t know, I now know.

Milestone 2

In this milestone we took a Khan academy quiz to see how much we knew about the Pythagorean theorem and how well we knew how to use it. There is not much else to write about this milestone.

 

Milestone 3

In this milestone we did an experiment to see if light would always reflect at the same angle it entered. For this lab we created a question, came up with an hypothesis, listed our materials and the procedure for the experiment, then did an analysis to find out if our hypothesis was correct, and then finally found a conclusion.

Milestone 4

This milestone was done in a lab format as well. We followed then same streps of coming up with a question, creating a hypothesis, etc. For this experiment we used a website to create a light display of a right angle triangle.

Milestone 5

In this milestone we built the actual laser displays. We used 4 mirror and 2 lasers to create our display. We decided to create an angry bird out of the 2 lasers. This was the final milestone of this project (other than milestone 6 which is this blog post).

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Competencies 🧐

Questioning and predicting

I used all of my time in class effectively and efficiently and had all of my work done on time, sometimes even early. This is competency is really quite simple so there isn’t much to write about it here.

Communicating and representing

I showed this competency durning the labs we did where we did an experiment to find out something related to the Pythagorean theorem or the law of reflection. I created a lab that went through all the steps of the scientific method. Each lab was able to draw a conclusion about either the Pythagorean theorem or the law of reflection.

Applying and innovating

This competency was shown by writing down the measurements of our display to accurately predict where the light would go. I used a ruler as well as the apple measuring app to get information that would allow for me to use the laws of reflection to estimate where the light of the laser would reflect to.

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Final Thoughts 🧠

Overall this was a really fun project. I learned a lot about light and the Pythagorean theorem, both things I didn’t know anything about. I think that this was probably the best project we have done so far this year in PLP. It was fun, included interesting topics, and included things that can be useful out side of school. I know that I will use both of these in my 3D work with Blender!

Thank you for reading my summative post about the Laser Laws project!