Review for:Refraction of light (total reflection)

posted: on February 19, 2007 at 2:32PM

Physics

Refraction of light: total internal reflection

The students had to predict how the angle of refraction changes as the mediums change and also they had to determine the critical angles for each pair of mediums that they explored.

Intro or Regular

The students moved the source of light (the flashlight) to change the angle of incidence and they changed the mediums using both the buttons and the table of refractive indices provided at the end of the web page. They also explored how the refracted ray moved when the light traveled from the less dense medium to the denser medium and vice versa.

Provides visualization or animation, Increases data collection & analysis skills, Provides a virtual lab, Increases student engagement and motivation

I consider this web resource to be very useful for the content exploration and very easy to use for the students.

This web site requires the users to have Adobe Flash Player installed on their computers. When I was using this website to teach the total internal reflection, the majority of my students did not have the Adobe player on their computers. So, I had to use my computer to provide my students with both the visual demonstration and the numerical data.