Processed Paper

By: Treise Disini

How was the topic chosen?

When i was given 5 choices to choose an experiment, the Polyethylene film
experiment stood out the most. Out of the 5 experiments, it seemed like it
had the most interesting theory behind it. Although, in the beginning, my
initial thought was to do the astroblaster because it seemed like Polyethylene
film was harder. Though, after conversing with my group members, I decided
that doing the experiment would push me because it would be a challenge
finding a creative extension and it would force me to learn the independent
research because light was a subject that we barely touched on. Throughout
the process of deciding my topic, my group mates would do a pros and cons
list and from the list we would determine our choices.
Plans and research
In the very beginning, i found it quite hard to do background research on
polyethylene film because all i was searching for was polyethylene film, the
results always came up with saran wrap or different materials of
polyethylene film. So in order to get the results i wanted, i searched up what
the experiment was based of, this was the thin-film interference
phenomenon. From this, i was able to extend my knowledge on my
experiment, i understood that when the light is reflected by the boundaries
of the thin film and interfere with each other thus creating a new wave. Then,
when you change the thickness the of the film to a quarter multiple of a
wavelength, the reflected waves from both surfaces destroy each other.
From this, i was able to understand my experiment even further and create
my experiment, How does the font size affect the height the film reaches
until you can no longer see the text? In addition to creating the experiment,
through the background research i was able to link the experiment to real life
like encryption.
Problems and solutions
Throughout the experiment we encountered many problems like the
Polyethylene film crumpling whilst we lift it up, this would greatly affect our
accuracy so we decided to try to solve this problem. At first we had tried
keep our hand wider apart so that the film would be stretched but this only
resulted in more folds in the middle, so Gabby came up with the idea to tape
rulers to the sides so that it would make it easier to lift the film without
crumpling it. Another problem that our group encountered was that there
were so many anomalies in the results that we gathered, the results were not
consistent so our group had to redo most of the results. Although, even after
we redid the anomalies the new results barely made a difference so we
wondered that it might be because we werent controlling the position the
person who was watching the text because if the position was standing for
one experiment and sitting during the other experiment we would get
different and inaccurate results. So we redid the whole experiment with one

person sitting down in the same spot throughout the whole experiment , sure
enough, by the end of the experiment we had consistent results. Moreover,
after we had plotted the results on the graph we noticed that our line of best
fit would be a curve but based on previous knowledge we remembered that
it would hard to calculate a gradient and explain it so i decided that we
should use a straight line as it will be easier for us.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the results i have gathered prove my hypothesis to be correct.
In the beginning of the experiment, i was clueless as to what the experiment
was actually about and the theory behind it but after some background
research and actually doing the experiment i was able to understand why the
text becomes blurry. The text become blurry because the film acts as a lens
in that it refracts light. When the film is close, the amount of refraction is
small because it has had little time to "spread out" the light waves. When it
is farther away, it has had more distance to refract upon. An example of this
is when you turn on a flashlight, it starts of very concentrated and then the
light beam gradually spreads out.
Evaluation and reflection
Overall, i think that our group worked really well with each other because we
worked efficiently and collaboratively. In the very first lesson, instead of
choosing any topic we wanted, we carefully worked out the pros and cons of
each of the topics, we chose the ones that we could easily relate to real life
and something that we can find an equation for and explain it. Furthermore,
for every week, we always finished our initial experiment on our second or
third day because we always worked as a team and helped each other out.
Although, throughout the whole process, we found it hard to control our
variables in the sand in the tube extension experiment. We had initially
planned to keep the angle at which the sand was coming out of the same
and to keep the size of the loop the same, this was difficult for us to do, we
tried to keep measuring the tube but it always moved so we tried taping it
but then we could not add sand through the tube. In the end, we settled on
taping the tube to a fitted angle but adding another tube so that we could
use the other end. Furthermore, we tapped the loop to make sure that the
loop would not change sizes as this will greatly affect the accuracy and
decrease the experimental error. In addition to this, for the polyethylene film
experiment we noticed that the experimental error increased during the
extension, the experimental error for the 1st experiment was 3.64% and the
extension experimental error was 7.94%. The experimental error increased
by 4.3%, this could be because we werent able to control the lighting in the
classroom and this could have affected our results as In the future, if i could
redo this experiment, i would control the light the is being reflected so that
we could decrease the experimental error and make our results more
accurate. Overall, i think that our group worked very well and efficiently

together, we were able to communicate clearly and get work done fast while
still having fun.