Laws Of Reflection (FINAL REFLECTION POST)

Hello! Welcome to my last Scimatics project, by now I’m sure you’ve checked out some of the other Scimatics projects I’m doing and this one follows the same principle as the others. First we get introduced to the driving question which is what were trying to solve, the driving question drives the project forward and every project we have in PLP has a driving question. Without one the project is pointless and you feel like you’ve done all that work just for nothing. The driving question for this Scimatics project was “How can we test the Pythagorean Theorem and the law of reflection”. When I saw the driving question for this project I was very interested in testing the laws of reflection and using the Pythagorean Theorem to find the hypotenuse. But if you know how the Pythagorean Theorem works you know it only works on right triangles, so Mr. Gross decided we should create our own right triangles and use the Pythagorean Theorem to measure them. So we started off with our first project, milestone 1. In case your wondering what a milestone is it’s basically an assignment that guides us further and further into the project until we have a good idea of what we should wright to answer the driving question. Anyway back to milestone 1: For milestone 1 me and my parter Alfie were challenged to make a short little mind map, a mind map is something you can create to put all you questions or understandings of certain things together so you can keep them there and then you can come back to it if you need any sort of information about something. The mind map we did was a very short and rough copy and was definitely our first draft. Here is a picture of our rough copy mind map:     And here is a complete copy of my mind map:

After milestone 1 we had a bunch of little stepping stones which was basically there to prepare us for other milestones. For milestone 2 we had a test to see if we have learned anything about the Pythagorean Theorem and was basically there to see if you have learned enough about the Pythagorean Theorem to continue in the project. For milestone 3 we were given a raybox, a protractor, a mirror, some paper, and a pencil. We were challenged to test the laws of reflection and we did this by using mirrors and reflected our raybox beam at a certain angle and we used a protractor to see what angle the beam was reflecting off. It turned out it was the reflected angle was the same as the incident angle. For milestone 4 Mr. Gross familiarized us with a laser simulation app that we could use the create right triangles and test the laws of reflection, after learning to use the simulation app we were challenged to make a right triangle and use the Pythagorean Theorem to measure your right triangle. This would all prepare us for milestone 5 were we would create a real life triangle and be challenged to build it in really life. After we created our right triangles in the simulation app we had to choose someone’s design. We ended up choosing my design mostly because I planed out how it was going to look and work. I used a 3D designing app to make a concept of what I want the box to look like, here is a picture of that:

Milestone 5 was the final step in our project it was the moment we were all working up to completing, because after completing milestone 5 you would be close enough to have an answer to the driving question. Milestone 5 we were challenged to take someone’s laser design and make it in real life. We made our design out of cardboard and plexiglass, we wanted to see the laser so I brought my smoke machine to school so we could see the laser inside the box. The reason we couldn’t see the laser in the first place was due to it not being a strong enough laser to see it in real life. This is a picture of our box when the smoke and laser were on:

Circular Competencies:

Questioning And Predicting:

I think I did an extending job at this Competency, for example if you looked back at my other Scimatics blog you would know I gamed a lot in class last project and I also wasn’t very engaged or interested in the project at all. I felt this needed to be changed this time around so i set a goal at the beginning of this project, to not touch on game this entire project. And it turned out I didn’t and it felt so good not to game in class and I just felt a lot engaged in my work and in my overall focus. So I believe I extended on this competency.

Communicating And Representing:

I believe I did a sophisticated demonstration of this competency. For example, when I created my right triangle we had to get precise measurements of the triangle, the measurements had to include the incident and the reflected angle, I had to re-do this step many times before I got a precise angle. Also my conclusion included the procedure and also included the Pythagorean Theorem calculation I did to find out what the hypotenuse was and to also find out if my triangle is a right triangle after all.

Applying And Innovating:

I also think I did a extending job at this circular competency, for example: Before building our laser box, me and Alfie made a short little plan of how we wanted it to work and function, we did this by taking a cardboard box and calculated the angles that our mirrors had to be facing to reflect the laser to make a right triangle. I mostly did the building when Alfie mostly did the calculations so we each fed of each others ideas and predictions. After finding out the measurements we labeled our box so people could see what lasers were what length and angle.

Overall, this project was very fun and always kept surprising me throughout the project. It was all very fun intriguing and a very engaging project and would go down to be my favourite Scimatics 8 project. So here we are, the moment this project has led up to. An answer the driving question the thing that has kept this project on the rails. Here is my answer to the driving question: Testing the Pythagorean Theorem and the laws of reflection proved to be no simple task, but the most simple way to test the Pythagorean Theorem is to try solving many different triangles to see if it would have the same results as a different method would, turned out no. And in the end the best way to test the Pythagorean Theorem is to just use it on other types of triangles and compare it to the right triangle, the test proved to be successful and proved the Pythagorean Theorem only works on right triangles. On the other hand testing the laws of reflection is a totally different task, but we found the most simple way to test it was to use mirrors and reflect a beam off of the mirror at a certain angle, and use a protractor to measure the incident angle and test to see if the incident angle proved to be the same as the reflected angle. It ended up being the same showing that the law of reflection will reflect at the same angle as the incident angle. In the end this project was very fun and interesting and I learned a lot about how the law of reflection works and about how the Pythagorean Theorem works, and at the end I got to use my smoke machine on everyone’s project and it looked amazing. Ill see you all in the next blog.