Subject:
|
Legos and Optics
|
Newsgroups:
|
lugnet.edu
|
Date:
|
Fri, 15 Sep 2000 17:29:33 GMT
|
Highlighted:
|
(details)
|
Viewed:
|
6264 times
|
| |
|
|
Howdy all,
I recieved some email from a fellow working on a senior project
involving using everyday objects
in physics education. Specifically he is curiously about building
optical instruments with Legos.
Here is what I came up with....
"Lessee...there would be the controllers for optical devices, for
example using the gears you can build the
device that tracks celestrial objects with a telescope. This would be
fun as you would have to calculate the
speed that the tracking instrument has to obtain and build a gear train
that would hit that rpm.
I have also hotglued small mirrors on gears, put the gears on motors,
placed the motors at three
different points on a board, shot a laser at the first spinning mirror
and arrange it so all three mirrors
get hit. I would have students write programs altering which motors were
on at what speed and direction,
and would have them predict the different output patterns.
My students have also collected all the clear and translucent bricks
from our collection and create interesting
sculptures. For example, one student built a pagada out of the
translucent bricks. We shot a laser into the
structure to observe what would happen ( made for some nice photographs!
).
The school has used Legos to build a frame on which we could support a
hair.You shoot a laser at the hair,
and observe the Kondratieff waves ( in the form of little black lines)
on the wall. Using some math,
students were able to calculate the thickness of the hair...and find out
who has the fattest hair!
( See Young's "Double Slit Experiment" as a reference )."
Any other ideas out there?
Richard
rwright@pcsedu.com
www.weirdrichard.com
|
|
1 Message in This Thread:
- Entire Thread on One Page:
- Nested:
All | Brief | Compact | Dots
Linear:
All | Brief | Compact
|
|
|
|
