Laser laws

The diving question for this project was “how can we test the Pythagorean theorem and the law of reflection?” You may not have understood what I just said so I will explain but if you already know what it is skip down to the second paragraph. The Pythagorean theorem is used to find the hypotenuse (longest side of a triangle) and you do that by adding the two legs (shorter sides of a triangle) together but it not that simple. Lets say that the lengths of the two legs are 10cm and 11cm, first you multiply the first number by its self so 10×10=100 and you do the same for the other leg so 11×11=121 then you add both numbers together 100+121=221 and that is technically the hypotenuse but to find the real answer you need to find the square root of the number that you got and if you do the math you get 14.8cm. So that’s how you do it, you can also use the Pythagorean theorem to find the length of a leg but it’s a little more complicated. You probably already know what the law of reflection is so I wont waste your time but if you don’t know what it is, the law of reflection states that light always bounces off of mirrors to make a image of you, to make a laser beam go in a different direction without using multiple, etc.

Now that you understand everything I will say what my favourite parts of this project were.

  1. Milestone 1 The project start mind map. I really liked doing it because at that point we didn’t really know anything about the project and I wanted to see if i could guess what we were doing.
  2. Milestone 4 laser triangle design. I really like doing this because it was the first time we incorporated the Pythagorean theorem and the law of reflection into one mini project and we did so by making a triangle out of a single laser and using two mirrors to make it into the shape but we didn’t measure the hypotenuse so we had to use the Pythagorean theorem to find it.
  3. milestone 5 laser display. I definitely had lots of fun doing this with my group because we did it in real life and not on a simulator like milestone 4. But it was really hard at times because we needed to keep it very sturdy at all times but Colton moved our table at least 10 times which lead to everything falling down so that wasn’t amazing but our final product looked pretty cool but not perfect.
  4. And last but not least the project end mind map. For that stepping stone, I went back to the one I made at the beginning of the project, answered all the questions I had and put a check mark on the things that ended up being apart of the project.

 

 

Curricular competencies:

for the first competency (questioning and predicting) I did pretty well except for that one day that he wrote down.

For the second competency (communicating and representing) I also did pretty good except for milestone 4 on the conclusion i couldn’t find a good way to talk about the law of reflection.

And for the last competency (applying and innovating) me and my group did pretty good with as you can probably tell because we got extending for that competency but that was mostly because we all contributed equally and our shape was accurate to what we wanted and built very good.

To conclude, I learned a lot from this project from new things in science to new things in math, but i liked this class most of all because i learned things that I won’t just use in school, but also in the real world.