Waves Unit Reflection

How does the use and study of waves affect societal well-being?

As I learned throughout this unit, there are a lot of ways that waves and their use might affect societal well-being. Firstly, waves are all around us – so, how can’t they affect something? We can summarize and say that they help us a lot-how would we be able to help humans from death and diseases without UV rays (new born babies in hospitals), x-rays or gamma rays (used in hospitals to treat cancer). Doctors use magnetic resonance and radio waves to see a picture of human’s tissue…. Radio waves and the Doppler effect are used to find the speeds of moving vehicles and of moving balls at sport events such as tennis matches- we wouldn’t want anyone to cheat on a tennis match, would we?! It’s impossible to live without the electromagnetic spectrum. Waves help us to understand the noise from loud music, they describe how instruments work, and certainly how glass can break during loud music (resonance). If we put all of these things together, we’d realize that all of these small things happen to us in our everyday lives, and we don’t even realize it! It seems that there is no way in the modern society that people can survive without waves… But we need to be careful!!! Too much of everything can be harmful to everything and that the same with waves- I can remind on hearing loss from too loud music, brain cancer from too much talk on mobile skin cancer from too much UV exposure….

I have learned a lot throughout this unit about different types of waves starting from water waves, to many extraordinary light waves, radio waves, microwaves etc.
In the beginning of the unit I thought that waves were just a bunch of waves we see every day at the beach, and I thought that only water waves existed (which is sort of embarrassing to admit). But now I know a lot more about waves that I never really knew I’d learn. There is a big difference between all of them, starting from ‘simple’, visible water waves, to seismic and sound waves, and ending with the electromagnetic spectrum (radio, microwave, infrared, visible light, ultraviolet, x-rays, gamma rays)
I mostly liked learning about the electromagnetic spectrum because it’s something I have never heard of before, and it really taught me a lesson. I learned a lot of facts, especially about microwaves because I had to make a Powerpoint about it with a group. I learned that you can get cancer from talking on the phone for a long time (especially little kids, because their brain is still developing). Listening to other classmates’ presentations, I learned a lot of valuable facts and included them in the debate discussion we had in science class. For example, I learned that visible light waves are the only electromagnetic waves we can see, and that we can see these waves as the colors of the rainbow. I have also learned that gamma waves have the smallest wavelengths and the most energy of any other wave in the electromagnetic spectrum. Pretty interesting, huh? I used to think that x-rays were only types of ‘machines’ used to make our eyes think that we’re seeing a skeleton body. But now I know that x-rays are a lot more than that. They have smaller wavelengths and therefore higher energy than ultraviolet waves. I would not go too deep into x-rays, because I could talk about them for hours. All of these things we learned in class are amazing, I would not never have learnt this if it weren’t for our fantastic teacher, Mrs.M! I would not really change much for next year’s grade 7 students- I loved the debate we had, it made me think deeper about the electromagnetic spectrum, and I think the presentations we did in groups were really useful too. However, I would make a little difference. In my opinion, next year you can have more students presentations of each part of the electromagnetic spectrum- so each of us would learn a whole bunch of the information they have researched about. This way, the grade sevens would learn a lot of if different interesting facts about waves but seen from the other students point of view!