Wow, grade 8 has gone by fast. It feels like just yesterday that I was getting my first tour of Seycove, and now I’m nearly in grade 9! Now all that is left to do is finish our main units and present on the exhibition nights, which I am quite excited for. Since it is the end of the year, we are going to have two exhibitions instead of one (one for Blue Sky and one for our Scimathic’s light unit). This will be our first Scimathics exhibition, and a time when we get to focus on our areas of interest and create something amazing. Yet, before we can begin working on these projects, we need to learn a bit about the function of light, and here is what we have done so far:
A Mirrored Response:
One thing I love about this light unit is how hands on it is. Instead of just doing work sheets, we get to experience how light works in real life, which definitely gives us a better understanding of it. One of the first things we did in this unit was a lab on light reflection with mirrors and other reflective surfaces. We used ray boxes to shine light off of smooth, convex, and concave mirrors, each with a different result. The smooth mirror relected the light right back, where the convex mirror diverged the light and the concave mirror converged it. We also shined it off crumpled tinfoil, white, and black paper, which was interesting because the tinfoil shined the light in many directions, the white paper reflected it relatively normally, and the black paper barely reflected it at all. Here are some diagrams of the light reflection:
We also did a lab on light refraction, which is where we watch how light bends as it travelles though a substance. First, we used a smooth block of glass, which blended the light when it entered it, but then returned it back to normal when the light left. Then we used bi-convex and bi-concave glass which had the same affects on the light as the mirrors in the previous lab did, but differed from the smooth glass for the light did not return to normal after leaving the glass. We also used water, ethanol, and olive oil, which had an affect on the distance, strength, and colour of the light beams.
FIRE!!!:
What’s a unit on light without a little fire? The Bunsen burner lab is probably one of my favourite that we have done this year, as well as the most visually amazing. To discover how light reacts with different chemicals, we burned a variety of them over a Bunsen burner, and the affects were incredible. We got flames of purple, white, and even neon green, which was of great delight to my lab partner (link here). Here are our results:
No Chemicals
A Traditional Experience:
The study of light isn’t something that is just done in science, but also in history and art. Wether is it examining the contrast of colours in a painting, or looking at the cultural significance of art throughout history, light can be found in many different fields of research. Because of this, we are also going to be looking at light within First Nation art and inscription for this unit along side of our light projects. Now because this unit is hands on, we not just going look at paintings, but get to make them ourselves, and because this unit is taught by Mrs. Klausen, we are going to get the full experience of creating First Nations paintings (yes that includes making paint adhesive by chewing up and spitting out fish eggs).
Traditional First Nations Art
The first step to creating any art is getting the materials, and Mrs. Klausen has gone well out of her way to make sure that ours are as authentic as possible. Traditional paints used by First Nations include copper nitrate, charcoal, indigo, and walnut gal, and have gotten access to all of them. To make things even more realistic, we also got to grind them in the woods to make them usable as paint. Here are some pictures of us grinding the materials:
New posts coming soon!