Posted on 23 January 2012 at 13:26h

Today I was introducing single slit diffraction to my SL class and was having difficulty showing how the phase changed as you increased the diffracting angle. I was trying to do it on the SMART board and could get an infinite number of wavelets by cloning one of them but couldn't get them to rotate in the right way to show how the phase changed. I managed to solve the problem at home using interactive physics to give the animation here. A couple of posts ago I wrote about how I was going to be more thorough when introducing new terms to my class. Today's term was "wavelet". Many students, especially native English speakers, were unsure if this was a proper word. One commented that it must be since it's in the text book (hmm). I assured them that putting let on the end of a word just makes it a small one. Like pig and piglet, book and booklet, leaf and leaflet, pamph and pamphlet. Oh dear.