You Light Up My Life!
In this engineering design unit, students design custom party lights for a school group. They learn about logarithms, including graphing a logarithmic function, how they are the inverse of the exponential function. They learn that human perception is logarithmic, and use logarithms to control luminosity changes in their party lights so that the changes look smooth and even to the human eye.
Core Content: Advanced Algebra, Pre-Calculus
Grade Levels: High School
ME Connection: Students will engage LED lighting and related microelectronics controllers that have the ability to alter color, intensity, luminosity and brightness. Micro:bits will be a classroom technology mechanism for delivering the lighting controls.
Engineering Design Project: Students are challenged to produce party lights that can be adjusted in color and intensity to match the intensity of music: e.g., slowly dimming/brightening calm colors for slow dances; bright colors and quickly brightening/dimming light for high-energy dancing. They will develop working prototypes that will be evaluated in a peer evaluation/review format.