This is the first of hopefully at least a few mini blog posts that I’ll write during the rest of senior project that I personally won’t count towards the two posts per week, but just because I wanted to share something, usually a single moment.

Over the weekend my mom asked me about my the research I was doing for my senior project. My mom is pretty smart, but is much more geared to humanities, especially writing and editing, than towards science. As such, I saw it as a perfect opportunity to test out the teaching strategies I’d learned thus far, most importantly starting with basics and building from there. So, I started out by explaining that lasers are essentially light in very tight bundles that are focused into a single point. The frequency/wavelength of the light determines how much energy the laser imparts onto a target over a certain period of time, with higher frequencies corresponding to greater energy outputs. Then, I explained that when using a laser cutter, one isn’t actually cutting anything; they are instead adding so much energy to a material’s system that a it heats it up greatly, causing a phase change from solid to gas, having a similar effect to a cut but really removing some material from the target. Higher frequency lasers vaporize their targets faster since they have a faster energy output. When I was done, she said “You lost me at wavelength, but I still understood it.” Even though she hadn’t really understood what wavelength and frequency were from my brief explanation, she’d understood their connection to energy output enough to the point that she was able to understand both the vaporization component of lasers and how those wave properties would affect it. That was a good moment for me, since it showed me that I was really learning and improving my teaching.