Hello everyone!

This is my second Scimatics blog post (even though it’s my third project I just didn’t have a blog back then) this project is called Laser Laws! I was super excited for this project when I heard about it. The two main concepts for this project were the Pythagorean Theorem and the Law of Reflection. Our driving question for this project was: How can we test the pythagorean theorem and the law of reflection?

In this blog post I’m going to tell you how I think I completed each curricular competency (there’s 3) then I’ll show you what I did for each milestone and finally I’ll link everyone in my groups blogs so you can check out their project reflection as well.

Questioning and Predicting: Demonstrate a Sustained Intellectual Curiosity About a Scientific Topic or Problem of Personal Interest.

When I do work in class I make sure to stay on track and use my time efficiently to complete my work on time. I find that once I start working I don’t want to stop especially if the thing I’m doing is a physical model. Thanks to COVID🦠 sometimes my teammates weren’t there and that just made it even more important for me to use my class time because we only had half our group. And I think I’ve shown exemplary time management skills.

Communicating and Representing: Represent Mathematical Ideas in Concrete, Pictorial, and Symbolic Forms.

For this competency we were supposed to show how we developed and implemented all the required steps of the scientific method. We were also supposed to show a conclusion about the law of reflection and the Pythagorean theorem that is precise. I think I’ve done that through both of my lab reports (which will be show under Milestone 4 and 5) because I was very precise with my measurements and I explained all of the steps I took to get too the end.

Applying and Innovating: Co-operatively Design Projects.

The criteria for this competency was that the laser triangle (or in our case star) is accurately planned out, labeled, measured and that all group members contribute equally. Like I mentioned earlier in the post Covid really sucks for group projects because, one day someone might not have been there. We only had 4 days of class time to build the laser path so the person who wasn’t there would miss 25% of our work time. My group stayed in contact with each other when we were sick but it was still very hard for everyone to contribute exactly equally. Even though it was hard we still managed and our laser triangle was very well planned.

Milestone 1: Project Start/End Mind Map

At the begging of this project like most Scimatics projects we started off by creating a mind map of what we know and some questions we have about the different subjects this is mine:

Then at the end of the project we do an end of project mind map where we answer the questions we had written down so here’s mine:

Milestone 2:  Law of Reflection Lab

Milestone 2 was about showing our learning about the law of reflection. This was the first time we worked as a group for this project. This was also the first time I had ever used a laser. I think the lab report will speak for itself so here it is:

Milestone 4 (we skipped milestone 3): Laser Triangle Design

Milestone 4 was the first time we started to plan out our laser triangle individually and whe I did this I missed a step so I got feedback from my teacher and I revised and added the step I missed. This is my lab report for this milestone: 

Milestone 5: Laser Display

This milestone is a lot like milestone four the different es are that I was working in a group instead of by myself and we had to build a physical model. My group wanted to do a star shape, at first I was really skeptical but eventually they convinced me to do it. The reason I was skeptical was because one of our pieces of criteria was that we have to have a right angle triangle and it is very hard to make a right triangle in a star. But with some planning we managed to figure it out. Then we had to build the path which was easier said than done. We had to think about angles and design wether or not the laser would hit the mirrors but, through trial and error we eventually found a good path for the laser but, then unfortunate but also fortunately someone from my group figured out that our right angle triangle wasn’t actually a right angle so we fixed it quickly. Here’s the planning and finished product:

 

(I promise that the laser does travel through every point it’s just really hard to capture it on camera)

74FD6F75-EABD-486F-A679-3FC2BEE79311

Here‘s everyone’s blogs:

Tom

Seth

Jessie

This project was super fun I really loved the design part of it even if it got a little stressful when something didn’t work. That’s the fun part of PLP solving all the problem that come up!

Thanks for reading -Sydney🙃