My students need four prism sets to learn about optics and infrared radiation.
$581 goal
Hooray! This project is fully funded
Hooray! This project is fully funded
Celebrating Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month
This project is a part of the Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month celebration because
it supports a Latino teacher or a school where the majority of students are Latino.
How can we see in infrared without expensive goggles? With a simple set of glass prisms we can separate and measure the amount of invisible infrared light found in ordinary sunlight, light bulbs, and other light sources.
I teach 11th and 12th grade students AP environmental science in a high needs urban high school in California.
Our students would like to be able to do more hands on field work and research as college-prep students and future stewards of the environment. However, we currently lack the funds for the purchase of anything other than the most basic laboratory equipment. Our school does a lot of work with environmental awareness, and our campus is a testament to the number of projects our school has done to better integrate our campus with the natural systems of the world. As a school we passionately pursue a variety of environmentally-conscious causes, but now our AP environmental science and physics students want to build their analytical and professional skills in order to prepare themselves for further training in college as well as careers centered on the creation and application of environmentally benign technology.
My Project
Our students learn how the Sun's light is one of the driving forces in our ecosystem, but they don't yet have the tools to measure how it travels through and affects our atmosphere and oceans. With a set of prisms we can measure how light bends in different materials, how it can become trapped, and how visible light is only a small portion of what our Sun produces. With prisms we will be able to split white light into a rainbow and show, by measuring the temperature around and within the rainbow, that the warmest 'color', infrared light, isn't visible at all. This understanding will help us understand how infrared light impacts our world, from climatology, to astronomy, to the signals sent from a TV remote control.
Beyond the specifics of measuring infrared light our students will experience how simple technology can change ones understanding of the world and how we can extend our senses to 'see' beyond our everyday experience.
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