Our ripple tank remote laboratory was funded by the Royal Academy of Engineering Ingenious Grant for public outreach. The ripple tanks were designed to support Waves lessons at Secondary School level (UK Nat5/GCSE, Higher/Adv. Higher/A Level).
Ripple tanks are typically presented as demonstrations (by a teacher) of basic wave phenomena, like reflection, refraction and diffraction. A primary goal of our remotely accessed ripple tanks was to give students the opportunity to actively participate in investigating wave behaviours. With 8 separate tanks (that can be individually configured for different activities (e.g. plane dipper, double point dipper, gaps, varying water depth), with the capacity to expand to 16 in the future, students can independently control frequency and amplitude of the generated waves and measure wavelengths using the on-screen measuring tools.
The Making Waves In Engineering Student Activity booklet (see PDF below) provides activities on wave speed and interference, using the single point dipper tanks and the double point source tanks respectively.
If you are a Secondary School teacher (or educator at any level) and you would like access to the remote ripple tanks, please contact us.
