Course Communities

 

send to a friend

Light's Speed in Water (radical functions, modeling)  

2 days. Hands-on activity using the actual path of light through your container of water. Students compute the speed of light in water and develop an understanding of why light reflects back if below a critical angle. It provides an opportunity to build a fairly complicated function from simpler ones in a physical setting, and then investigate the function to learn something about the real world. It involves investigation of function with a parameter. This unit is appropriate for a precalculus course in a unit on functions or or in a unit on functions involving radicals. It has also been used in elementary calculus courses as a conceptual introduction to optimization.

Resource URL: http://www.curriki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Coll_Group_SanDiegoCommunityCollegesDevelopmentalMathExchange/LightsSpeedinWaterradicalfunctionsmodeling?bc=;Coll_Group_SanDiegoCommunityCollegesDevelopmentalMathExchange.IntermediateAlgebra;Coll_Group_SanDiegoCommuni

To rate this resource on a 1-5 scheme, click on the appropriate icosahedron:

						Current rating: 3	number of votes: 226
1	2	3	4	5

Subject classification(s): Functions | Algebra | Algebra and Number Theory | Applied Mathematics | Mathematical Physics

Creator(s): Mark Sandefur (Georgetown University) and Rosalie Dance (University of the Virgin Islands)

This resource was cataloged by Bohdan Rhodehamel

Related Resources

Comments

• See comments on this resource.
• Make a comment on this resource.
• See general comments on Developmental Math.

Report a problem with this resource.