Notes

Many Physics courses will begin the topic of waves with a discussion of wave properties such as wavelength, frequency, period, amplitude and speed. This concept provides students with practice recognizing the number of waves displayed in a pattern and using such information to determine the wavelength. This Concept Builder is intended for use near the early to middle stages of a learning cycle on wave properties and mathematical relations.

This Concept Builder was intended as an in-class activity. After some brief discussion of the definition and meaning of wavelength, accompanied by some guided practice with several examples, allow students to put the principles into practice by the completion of the exercise. The Concept Builder includes three activities. Teachers using the Concept Builder with their classes should preview the activity (or view the Questions in the separate file) in order to judge which activities would be most appropriate for their students. There is no redundancy from one activity to another activity. That is, all the questions in the third activity are unique to that activity. Our summary of the three activities is as follows:

In order to complete an activity, a student must correctly analyze each question in that activity. If a student's analysis is incorrect, then the student will have to correctly analyze the same or very similar question twice in order to successfully complete the activity. This approach provides the student extra practice on questions for which they exhibited difficulty. As a student progresses through an activity, a system of stars and other indicators are used to indicate progress on the level. A star is an indicator of correctly analyzing the question. Once a star is earned, that question is removed from the que of questions to be analyzed. Each situation is color-coded with either a yellow or a red box. A red box indicates that the student has incorrectly analyzed the question and will have to correctly analyze it twice before earning a star. A yellow box is an indicator that the question must be correctly analyzed one time in order to earn a star. Once every question in an activity has been analyzed, the student earns a trophy which is displayed on the Main Menu. This system of stars and trophies allows a teacher to easily check-off student progress or offer credit for completing assigned activities.

The most valuable (and most overlooked) aspect of this Concept Builder is the Help Me! feature. Each question group is accompanied by a Help page that discusses the specifics of the question. This Help feature transforms the activity from a question-answering activity into a concept-building activity. The student who takes the time to use the Help pages can be transformed from a guesser to a learner and from an unsure student to a confident student. The "meat and potatoes" of the Help pages are in the sections titled "How to Think About This Situation:" Students need to be encouraged by teachers to use the Help Me! button and to read this section of the page. A student that takes time to reflect upon how they are answering the question and how an expert would think about the situation can transform their naivete into expertise.

There are a few resources at The Physics Classroom website that serve as very complementary supports for the Wavelength Concept Builder. These include:
 

Additional resources and ideas for incorporating this Wavelength Concept Builder into an instructional unit on Vibrations and Waves can be found at the Teacher Toolkits section of The Physics Classroom website. Visit Teacher Toolkits.