"Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought." -Albert Szent-Gyorgyi
Optics |
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I designed and taught a 12th grade class on optics as part of my student teaching experience. One of my goals for this class was to spark students’ curiosity by observing a puzzling natural phenomenon and encouraging them to use their own ideas to explain it, hopefully leading them to naturally generate the science content I was aiming to teach. We started out with observations of a candle flame through a pinhole, which was a source of engaging phenomena that really got the students thinking. Through class discussions of their observations, they developed two rules to explain the phenomena, which they expressed as, “Light travels in straight lines” and “From every infinite point on a light source, light extends in every infinite direction.” These are, of course, key elements of the ray model of geometric optics, which we then explored in further detail by studying mirrors and lenses.
For a final project, I had each student research and build an optical device of their choice, and we showcased them in a “museum walk” for our final class. This allowed students to self-differentiate both by ability and interest: they could choose a device as simple or as complex as they wanted with an application that interested them. One student built a very simple periscope and was able to really understand how it worked, and another student who will be going to art school next year built a device that projects an image of a 3-dimensional scene onto a mirror above an artist’s canvas to help make a more realistic painting, inspired by Tim's Vermeer. The students appreciated the opportunity to show some individuality in the context of a science class and took real pride in their final products.
For a final project, I had each student research and build an optical device of their choice, and we showcased them in a “museum walk” for our final class. This allowed students to self-differentiate both by ability and interest: they could choose a device as simple or as complex as they wanted with an application that interested them. One student built a very simple periscope and was able to really understand how it worked, and another student who will be going to art school next year built a device that projects an image of a 3-dimensional scene onto a mirror above an artist’s canvas to help make a more realistic painting, inspired by Tim's Vermeer. The students appreciated the opportunity to show some individuality in the context of a science class and took real pride in their final products.