Up in room 308 we spend lots of time looking at all sorts of cool things. Room 308 is our science room by the way. Anyways, this past unit has been about light, reflection, and lenses. The first thing we had to do was prove that light was a wave. This was super hard for me because we hadn’t learned about light yet and we weren’t allowed to search it up. Me and paisley showed that it was a wave by using two mirrors and a light and then shone the reflected light onto my face. We were shown a documentary about all the creatures that use light for many different purposes. Humans are definitely not the only ones using it. For example fireflies and jellyfish use light as a warning to predators to stay away.

We then started learning about different types of mirrors such as convex, concave, and plain. After we all had a basic understanding of the concept, we began a small lab where we showed light reflecting of plain mirrors at certain angles. My partner was Taylor because we were both away on the day we began this so we started it late together. It was cool to see where the light bent and seeing patterns in the different angles that we shone the light from.

After this lab we started looking that the formula of how light bounces of reflective surfaces. We did a few worksheets to understand it. I thought it was pretty fun even though I got quite confused at some points. Since light is a way you have to draw it’s track in reflection. You had to drawn a parallel line and then draw it go through the focus point, and then vise versa. We did this with convex, concave, and plain lenses. To help us understand this even more Mrs. Klaussen showed us how the refelections worked. We went outside with a huge concave mirror on a sunny day and started to burn some of a girl guides cookie box. It never caught fire but it started to smoke and the area became really hot.

This display was so cool and really made me see it as a real thing and not just as the diagrams I was seeing on the worksheets. The last thing we worked on was the Big Fat Lenses Lab. This was a lab in which we used rayboxes to refract light through lenses. We used a lexan block, a bi-concave lens, and a bi-convex lens. My partner for this project was Jason. This lab was actually super cool because I was able to see the patterns between the different lenses or angles that I shone the light from.

We then watched a documentary about what Islam brought to light. It was super interesting. Overall I really enjoyed this unit and thought.