Optics
One of my favorite topics to teach is optics and I really like doing at the end of the school year with my honors classes. There are so many experiments that you can do and many involve going outside on a nice Spring day. What student is going to complain about that? Reflection with a plane mirror is the old "go-to" experiment for this section, but it is a lot of work to get your students to sight the pins correctly. Pen lasers will make this easier and quicker. I often do the traditional refraction of a plate glass lab with my students...no better way to get the bending of light across to your students. I often use pen lasers to let them really "see" the refraction. Here are some of the inquiry experiments that I have used over the years.
Plane Mirrors Inquiry Experiment I am not a big fan of all the work that comes with sighting pins and using plane mirrors, so here is a more interesting way for your students to learn more about the Law of Reflection...laser golf! How many mirrors, location of targets, size of targets, etc. can all be variables that you change up to make this exercise a little more or less challenging. Not much of an actual investigation, but they are still doing physics!
Lenses Inquiry Experiment This is my version of the traditional lens experiment where the students learn all about the object-image relationships with a converging lens. Rather than walking them through it step by step, I just give the students actual uses of the setup and ask them to make it happen. I love this lab...there are a lot of WOW moments for the students. They finally get to "see" physics and most importantly, this is the best way that I know how to get the idea of a virtual image across to them.
AP_Optics Inquiry Experiment I would call this my most open ended inquiry investigation...design an experiment about optics, no limits. Lots of laser usage and a whole lot of interesting thoughts and experiments developed!