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From: | Mark Horner |
Subject: | Re: [Fhsst-physics] Optics topic opinions? |
Date: | Fri, 03 Feb 2006 09:16:44 -0800 |
User-agent: | Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060130 SeaMonkey/1.0 |
Hi LindsayThanks for the kick on this topic. I just had a chat with Sam (Maths coordinator) and we have decided, but its open to debate, to include it using the small angle approximation.
We must clearly mark the 'derivation' as Grade 12 level. They will cover most of the Optics chapter in Grade 10.
So I would introduce the idea conceptually, quote the formula and use it in some examples. Following that have a derivation section which won't be very long. That way it doesn't break up the flow but is included.
We will have to tidy up introduction of the small angle approximation after having a good look at the ideas we cover in Maths but Physics is ahead right now.
How does that sound? Mark address@hidden wrote:
Mark (and/or anybody else): The topic of apparent depth is coming up in working on the optics chapter. We'd like to include a way to derive the apparent depth of an object in the chapter, but there seem to be two options, both with something nasty: (1) The nice result: real depth/apparent depth ratio is the index of refraction of water (or whatever material). This is easy to derive, but requires a small angle approximation. I'm worried that the small-angle approximation would be confusing to students. (2) Derive a more accurate formula. Not bad, but ends up with a formula involving tangents of inverse sines. Here I'm worried that students would get scared away by that much trig, and also the result isn't terribly enlightening. I guess a third option would be to discuss the topic conceptually and not develop a formula. Any thoughts? Lindsay _______________________________________________ Fhsst-physics mailing list address@hidden http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/fhsst-physics
-- --Mark Horner Jabber/AIM/Yahoo/Gizmo/Skype/Google: marknewlyn
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