Exploring Light with Optics

Supplement your optics unit with engaging activities on human vision, telescopes, lasers, fibre optics, and optics equations. 

How Do We See? 

In this station lab, students perform six quick hands-on activities that explore how the eye uses a converging lens, how the eye sees objects at varying distances, how the pupils work, how peripheral vision works, how to locate the eye’s blind spot, and why we have two eyes. 

Telescopes 

Students do a series of activities with flashlights, colour filters, and real astronomical images to explore how telescopes work. 

Design Challenge: Laser Maze Physics 

Students use their knowledge of reflection and refraction to build and solve laser mazes using small lasers, plastic squares, mirrors, beamsplitters, and a cardboard box. 

Understanding Fibre Optics 

Students do optics experiments with an acrylic block and use their results to investigate total internal reflection. They then connect their findings to fibre optics. 

Developing Optics Equations 

Students use different models of light and geometry to derive three common optics equations. This activity is designed to be used as a follow-up lesson to experimental explorations of refraction. 

Now You See It, Now You Don’t 

Supplement your optics unit with three interactive demonstrations of reflection, refraction, and lenses. Students create their own illusion of a hologram with a smartphone and a plastic pyramid. They create cloaking devices with either prisms or lenses.