Learning Light's Properties
City street lights at night.Copyright Microsoft Corporation, One Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052-6399 USA. All rights reserved.
Students learn the basic properties of light — the concepts of light absorption, transmission, reflection and refraction, as well as the behavior of light during interference. Lecture information briefly addresses the electromagnetic spectrum and then provides more in-depth information on visible light. With this knowledge, students better understand lasers and are better prepared to design a security system for the mummified troll.
Absorbency is an important concept that biomedical engineers must address when designing and using lasers. In surgery, for example, when a patient is having an operation involving laser ablation, the doctor must be aware of the absorbance of the tissue at hand in order to choose a wavelength on the laser with minimum absorption depth. The concept of the laser's light being absorbed, reflected or refracted off the human body is crucial for students to understand as it leads them to designing a laser alarm system that has a distinct means of triggering. This topic is addressed in questions 4, 5 and 6 of the post-lesson assessment.
After this lesson, students should be able to:
- Understand basic properties of light.
- Explain various behaviors of light.
This lesson also meets the following Tennessee Foundations of Technology educational technology content standards: 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, 5.0, 6.0, 7.0 and 8.0; see https://www.teta.org/
This lesson also meets the following National Science Education Standards (NSES) teaching standards: A, B, C, D, E, F; see https://www.nap.edu/topic/