Week 9 | Alien Card Sort and Refraction | #Teach180

Alien Card Sort

The periodic table is truly a scientific masterpiece and students are taught to use the periodic table as a powerful reference to describe and predict throughout the entire semester. Before we introduce the table as it is, I think it's important that students have an appreciation of the process that was used to create the table in the first place and the predictive ability that put Mendeleev's table on the map. A colleague found this great Alien Periodic Table intro activity where students were asked to organize a set of drawings and figure out what was missing. This was a really cool way to talk about the idea of periodic patterns in a way that was more accessible and element properties. It provided a great jumping point to then start talking about Mendeleev and his table.

#Day35: Introduced the periodic table with an alien card sort. What do the 2 missing aliens look like? #Teach180 pic.twitter.com/JAbMCosXke

— Joe Cossette (@cossettej) November 2, 2015

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Refraction

Ever since I was a freshman in high school, light and optics has always been one of my favorite Physics topics. Unfortunately, optics has largely fallen off the Minnesota State Standards. The only mention of reflection and refraction language are in the standards as the concepts relate to the the physics of sound. Nevertheless, we decided that it was important that students at least understand the basics of refraction in terms of Snell's Law and total internal reflection.

#Day36: introduced refraction and Snell's Law. Tomorrow we practice, practice, practice! #Teach180 pic.twitter.com/pfz8JJPniw

— Joe Cossette (@cossettej) November 4, 2015

#Day37: Not everything is what it seems... #ScienceofLight #Refraction #Teach180 pic.twitter.com/nsWur463Lm

— Joe Cossette (@cossettej) November 5, 2015

What makes refraction great is it is something that you can SEE. Our brains can only interpret where we see the light coming from. We can't fully factor in the bending of the light that happens before it enters our eyes. Because of this, there are several situations that can surprise us. The outcomes suggest that we literally "cannot believe our eyes"

We can also use optics to help us identify things. In chemistry we do things like this all the time. We can identify materials using properties that we can measure like melting point, physical appearance, reactivity, density, etc. In our last supply order, we purchased several optics kits complete with prisms of several different shapes. However, even after looking through all of the documentation, I couldn't find anything included about what the index of refraction or identity of the material was. I decided that this was a perfect opportunity to spin it back on the students and have them use what they knew about Snells law to work backward and identify the prism material for me :)

#Day41: Can you trace the refracted light rays to figure out the index of refraction for my new prisms? #Teach180 pic.twitter.com/9FU1GnhdWe

— Joe Cossette (@cossettej) November 6, 2015