My Students

My students are working to learn physics with limited materials.

My students attend a community school in a recently growing suburban area.

The school has grown rapidly over the past decade and has quadrupled in size. The students I have in class are the few who are exposed to physics in our district as it is not a requirement for graduation. I am hoping that an increase in the number of interesting, meaningful projects and activities will increase the interest in physical science and engineering in the students in our school.

My Project

With the requested materials, my students will be able to see the bending of light, total internal reflection of light, interference patterns caused by the diffraction of light, and be able to experiment with the physical characteristics that effect each of these phenomena. Students will determine the index of refraction of a rectangular prism by exploring Snell's Law. Using the reflection and refraction tank, students will be able to visualize the path light takes as it moves from one material to the other and how it is reflected by the barrier of the materials. The students will use the lasers and diffraction gratings to explore the wavelike properties of light by seeing how changing variables effects the interference patterns.

My major objective is to draw more students to studying physics.

The activities I have planned with these materials will increase interest in physical science within my school. Students are more interested and learn more in classes where they are active participants. Additionally, students who study physical science achieve higher levels of mathematics, increasing their likelihood of success in college, and opening more doors for them in the future.