Dr Harlow visits Cedarbrae with VROC

Today we had an amazing talk with Dr. Jason Harlow (http://www.physics.utoronto.ca/~jharlow/) from The University of Toronto.  Dr Harlow gave a great background on many different types of physics and how they are all related.  He spoke about optics and astronomy which sparked tons of questions from my class.  Students asked about plutos “demotion”, lasers, saturns rings, speed of light, black holes, and if aliens existed.  Dr. Harlow gave great answers and so much for my students to think about.  We are just starting the optics unit and it was amazing how he linked optics to last years grade 9 topic of space.  Students saw there was a clear connection and it is important to know general science even when researching something specific.  The Cedarbrae C.I. grade 10’s all felt very inspired and said they would like to contact him again at the end of the unit to share what they have learned with him.

He also shared a post he had done regarding if lasers are dangerous to pilots.  This was very fitting because many students heard on the news that green lasers have been aimed at planes resulting in people being arrested and wanted to know the dangers of this.   http://www.physics.utoronto.ca/~jharlow/teaching/lasers.html

Thank you VROC (http://www.vroc.ca/) and Dr Harlow for the time you took with our class today as it was highly engaging and sparked so much interest to start off the optics unit!

Mr Zoras