Project:

INVITATION

How can we provide opportunities for students to creatively apply knowledge of light and sound? How can we encourage students to work with fractions, measurements, scale, and other math concepts as tools for representing ideas? How can we help them put science and technological development in an historical context?

TASKS

Students design lighthouses that they situate in a geographic place and an historical time; as part of this work they conduct research, make decisions, connect a certain historical period to a level of technology, learn about light and sound, design systems for projection of light and sound, and make scale drawings.

TOOLS

Computers; the Internet (optional); Sherlock (optional).

AppleWorks; Destination: Time Trip, USA; Mapmaker's Toolkit; World Book Encyclopedia; Zap!.

The Cruncher (optional); Mighty Math Calculating Crew (optional); What's the Big Idea, Ben Franklin? (optional).

Library resources.

INTERACTIONS

After being introduced to the project as a class, students work in small groups for the remainder of the project. In Phase 3, half the students in each group work together in the role of Light Engineers while the other half works together as Sound Engineers. The teacher introduces the project and then provides general guidance to groups.

<STANDARDS

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SITUATIONS

Students work in any location that is conducive to group work and has access to computers and (optionally) the Internet. Each phase requires at least several hours to complete; to allow students time for exploration and creative thinking, the length of each phase should be kept open-ended.

ASSESSMENT

Teachers may want to have groups use checklists to evaluate whether or not they are ready to move on to the next phase. The teacher can use a rubric to assess groups' lighthouse designs based on their creativity and detail, their overall clarity and organization, and what they demonstrate about group members' understanding of the historical development of technology and the basic principles of light and sound. Copies of the completed projects can be placed in students' portfolios.

Since ancient times, people have built lighthouses to warn mariners away from dangerous rocks and shoals and to mark harbor entrances. Atop the 120-meter-tall Pharos of Alexandria, Egypt (one of the seven wonders of the ancient world) a fire burned constantly to show seafarers the way to the harbor. Since that time, lighthouses have gradually evolved, using light (and sometimes sound, in dense fog) to announce their locations in ways that reflected the technology of the times.

In this project, students work in small groups to design lighthouses and situate them in time and space. They create beacons of light and sound appropriate to an historical period they choose, decide where the lighthouse should be located, and draw up scale plans for the lighthouse's construction.

Phase 1: Choosing a time and place

Discuss with the whole class the role of lighthouses in marine navigation, showing images of lighthouses if available. Where are lighthouses usually located? What does a lighthouse need to do to serve its purpose? What besides light can a lighthouse use to warn vessels of dangers?

Introduce the project's goal (the design of a lighthouse) and have small groups begin by placing their lighthouse in history. They can choose any period in American history, from colonial times to the present, knowing that their lighthouse must fit the technology and needs of that period.

For a good overview of historical periods, groups can explore the Fact Book in Destination: Time Trip, USA, which outlines the ways of life, technologies, transportation methods, architectures, and so on of six time periods: 1640, 1776, 1865, 1929, 1945, and Today.

Once a group has chosen a "place" in time, its members can choose a geographic place for the lighthouse. Using Mapmaker's Toolkit, the group examines maps of the coastal United States and the Great Lakes looking for a likely spot, such as a cape or an entrance to a bay. Once the group has chosen a location, they can mark it with an appropriate icon and save the map as a file for use in Phase 4.

Phase 2: Evaluating needs and possibilities

Based on their choices in Phase 1, group members consider the parameters of their lighthouse's design: From what materials can it be built? How tall should it be? What is the best way of using the technology of the time to create a bright light or a loud sound? Is electricity available at the time or not?

Group members can hunt for answers to these questions in Destination: Time Trip, USA and World Book Encyclopedia. A good starting point is the World Book Encyclopedia article "Lighthouse," which describes what lighthouses do and outlines how they have changed over time. Students may also want to explore the World Book Encyclopedia articles "Electric Light" and "Electricity," which describe the historical development of lighting technology. Additionally, students can search the Internet with Sherlock or use library resources. Students can use the "Searching World Book Encyclopedia" or "Searching With Sherlock 2" Step-by-Step Cards to help with their research.

	Searching World Book Encyclopedia
	Searching With Sherlock 2
	Searching World Book Encyclopedia 2001

Phase 3: Designing the warning systems

Groups turn to creating plans for the lighthouses' warning systems. Suggest that each group begin with a thorough exploration of both Blaze's Laser Lab and Riff's SoundWave Studio in Zap! for an introduction to relevant principles and vocabulary. They can also investigate the Sound and Light topics in the Sci-Clopedia. After they finish working with Zap!, students should have a good understanding of how light travels, bounces, and bends, and they should understand the ways in which sounds are created and the sound-related concepts of frequency and amplitude.

Each group now divides itself in two, with half the members taking on the role of Light Engineers, the other half the role of Sound Engineers. Aware of the technical possibilities of their chosen historical period (from their research in Phase 2), each engineer subgroup draws up plans for its warning system, using a drawing document in AppleWorks.

Light Engineers should address these issues: What is the source of the light? How can mirrors (both flat and curved) be used to make the light go in the desired direction? How can lenses be used to focus the light? If there is a single beam of light, will it move? How? Will the light blink on and off? As they design their light systems, Light Engineers may want to use the Explore Mode in Blaze's Laser Lab to experiment with light sources, mirrors, lenses, and barriers (if they do so, however, they should be aware that the lasers in the Laser Lab produce single, directed beams of light, whereas the light sources they will likely use for their lighthouses produce beams of light radiating out in every direction). Students can use the "Using the Explore Mode in Zap!" Step-by-Step Card for help with this activity.

Meanwhile, Sound Engineers design their sound-generating systems, explaining how the sound is generated and describing its qualities of loudness and pitch using their newly acquired vocabulary.

Each system can be presented as a drawing that illustrates the system's main parts, along with a written description of what the system does and how it does it. The plans for the light system should show beams of light as straight lines with a certain direction.

Using the Explore Mode in Zap!

Phase 4: Designing the structure

Groups complete their lighthouse designs by working together to create scaled plans of the building itself, showing its size and shape, the location of the light and sound warning systems, and some of the details of construction. Plans should include, at minimum, a floor plan (view from above) and a building profile (view from the side or front). These plans can be created with the AppleWorks drawing tools. Students can use the "Using the Drawing Tools in AppleWorks" Step-by-Step Card to help with creating their plans.

Each plan should be drawn to scale and include an indication of the chosen scale, written as a fraction or ratio. For example, if the lighthouse is drawn at a hundredth of its actual size, the scale is 1:100 or 1/100. To enhance their understanding of scale, students can measure the length of the walls in their floor plan. Help them see that if you multiply the measured length by the reciprocal of the scale fraction, you get the actual length of the wall (if the lighthouse were built).

Projects, which should include a location map, an indication of the historical setting, a plan for a light warning system, a plan for a sound warning system, and scale drawings of the building, can be turned in as bound reports, or the pages can be mounted on a poster, along with other graphic elements, to create a display.

Vocabulary: Amplitude, Beacon, Floor Plan, Frequency, Lens, Ratio, Scale.

Using the Drawing Tools in AppleWorks

Phase 1: Groups can use either a current map or an historical map as their base map. Current maps in Mapmaker's Toolkit show greater detail, but historical maps show areas that were settled at the time. You might suggest that students examine historical maps for the information they convey, but use current maps (with the appropriate layers turned on or off) as their base maps.

Phase 1: To inform their search for lighthouse locations, groups can use World Book Encyclopedia. Suggest that they locate the articles for coastal states in which they have interest - many of these contain a section on the state's coastline and describe coastline features and shipping hazards. World Book Encyclopedia also has maps that are in some cases more detailed than those in Mapmaker's Toolkit.

Phase 3: The basic technique for directing, in a single direction, the light from a typical (non-laser) light source (such as a light bulb) is to place it within a concave mirror. This is what is done with flashlights and automobile headlights.

Phase 4: Students need to select a scale factor (a fraction or ratio) to construct their scale drawings in Phase 4. Suggest that they enter their estimates of the life-sized dimensions of the lighthouse into a spreadsheet in The Cruncher. To find the equivalent dimensions in their scale drawing, they multiply the life-sized dimensions by their selected scale factor. In a spreadsheet, it's easy to change the scale factor and explore different possibilities to find the most reasonable scale to fit their drawings in the AppleWorks document.

Phase 4: Showing the gridlines in the AppleWorks drawing documents makes scale drawing easier.

PREPARATION

Review the topics related to light and sound in the Zap! Sci-Clopedia.

This project helps students explore ratios, fractions, proportions, scale, area, and perimeter through the creation of scale drawings. You might need to introduce these concepts, or review them in relation to drawing. It might be helpful for your students to review the activities on operations with fractions, found in the Nautical Number activity in Mighty Math Calculating Crew.

Make copies of the Step-by-Step Card "Using the Explore Mode in Zap!" so that you can hand them out to the Light Engineers when they begin working with the Explore Mode in Blaze's Laser Lab in Phase 3. You might also want to make copies of any of the other Step-by-Step Cards that students may find useful.

Using the Explore Mode in Zap!

OPTIONS AND EXTENSION ACTIVITIES

To extend students' understanding of scale in Phase 4, consider having students calculate areas of rectangular objects in their floor plans and corresponding areas in the life-sized building. If they compare corresponding areas using a fraction, they will discover that this fraction is the square of the scale fraction they used in the drawing.

Lighthouse plans can be presented as oral reports, aided by the AppleWorks presentation component.

Groups can use the postcard template in Destination: Time Trip, USA to compose postcards describing life at their lighthouses.

By the time they finish their lighthouse designs, students' lighthouses will have quite a bit of concrete detail and will seem very real to their creators. As such, they provide perfect settings for fictional compositions such as short stories and poems.

Groups that chose to set their lighthouses in the historical period around 1776 may want to explore much of What's the Big Idea, Ben Franklin?, both to get a better flavor of the times and to learn from Ben Franklin's creative mind and practical approach to invention and design.

THE HOME-SCHOOL CONNECTION

Ask students to take home their completed project reports to share with someone in their family, or an adult friend. They can ask the family member or friend to imagine what it would be like to be lighthouse keepers together for six months. What concerns would they have? What would they need in order to feel comfortable there? What in the experience do they find interesting?