In this activity, students determine their own eyesight and calculate what a good average eyesight value for the class would be. Students learn about technologies to enhance eyesight and how engineers play an important role in the development of these technologies.

Students examine the structure and function of the human eye, learning some amazing features about our eyes, which provide us with sight and an understanding of our surroundings. Students also learn about some common eye problems and the biomedical devices and medical procedures that resolve or help to lessen the effects of these vision deficiencies, including vision correction surgery.

Vision Center is a web guide created for those seeking information about eye care and health, contacts, glasses, sunglasses, LASIK eye surgery (and other vision correction options), and other optometry needs. VC specializes in producing authoritative medical content in various health verticals, including vision and dentistry.

All content published on Vision Center is researched, written, and edited by licensed optometrists, experienced journalists, and other medical writers in the industry. All pages and topics on the website are fact-based and sourced from recent scientific research, scholarly articles, textbooks, government agencies, and medical journals.

Use this website to:
Login to your EYE-TA account
Confirm each student's details
Print class lists for observation of the EYE-TA
Access the 100 Activities
Access frequently asked questions and responses
Enter your EYE-TA data
Run the reports for your class
Run the individual student report

As stated on the website, "The Early Years Evaluation – Teacher Assessment (EYE-TA) measures a variety of items and provides a holistic picture for school leaders." This link will provide an overview and explanation of each component of the assessment as well as the research behind it.

Students are introduced to the Robotics Peripheral Vision Grand Challenge question. They are asked to write journal responses to the question and brainstorm what information they require to answer the question. Their ideas are shared with the class and recorded. Then, students share their ideas with each other and brainstorm any additional ideas. Next, students draw a basis for the average peripheral vision of humans and then compare that range to the range of two different focal lengths in a camera. Through the associated activity provides, students see the differences between human and computer vision.

"BLOSSOMS video lessons are enriching students' learning experiences in high school classrooms...Our Video Library contains over 100 math and science lessons, all freely available to teachers as streaming video and Internet downloads and as DVDs and videotapes."

Learn about:
*biology
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Select Videos (then video library), Projects or Resources (then your subject) from the top menu and the subject you'd like resource for to get started.

This lesson describes the function and components of the human nervous system. It helps students understand the purpose of our brain, spinal cord, nerves and the five senses. How the nervous system is affected during spaceflight is also discussed in this lesson.

Vision is the primary sense of many animals and much is known about how vision is processed in the mammalian nervous system. One distinct property of the primary visual cortex is a highly organized pattern of sensitivity to location and orientation of objects in the visual field. But how did we learn this? An important tool is the ability to design experiments to map out the structure and response of a system such as vision. In this activity, students learn about the visual system and then conduct a model experiment to map the visual field response of a Panoptes robot. (In Greek mythology, Argus Panoptes was the "all-seeing" watchman giant with 100 eyes.) A simple activity modification enables a true black box experiment, in which students do not directly observe how the visual system is configured, and must match the input to the output in order to reconstruct the unseen system inside the box.

Check out these great video/curricular resources for Kindergarten. The ROVER videos all indicate the curriculum outcomes that they address.

ROVER (Recommended Online Video Education Resources) is a video streaming service for Saskatchewan teachers and students in the PreK-12 education system. It is managed and maintained by the Saskatchewan Ministry of Education. ROVER is a video-on-demand service that provides teachers and students with the convenience of immediate access to streamed, educational videos that support curricula.

This site also offers all of the curriculum documents for all grade levels.

If you are unable to access the site, it may be because a Saskatchewan Ministry of Education Blackboard login is required. All students have an Edonline account, so contact your child's school or the Ministry of Education’s Support Desk at 1-866-933-8333 or email at networkservices@gov.sk.ca for login information. Your child's student number will be required.

Students learn about glaucoma its causes, how it affects individuals and how biomedical engineers can identify factors that trigger or cause this eye disease, specifically the increase of pressure in the eye. Students also learn how RFID technologies transfer energy through waves and how engineers apply their scientific understanding of waves, energy and sensors to develop devices that measure the pressure in the eyes of people with glaucoma. Students conclude by sketching their own designs for a pressure-measuring eye device, preparing them to conduct the associated activity in which they revise, prototype and evaluate their device designs made tangible with a 3D printer.

Students are introduced to an engineering challenge in which they are given a job assignment to separate three types of apples. However, they are unable to see the color differences between the apples, and as a result, they must think as engineers to design devices that can be used to help them distinguish the apples from one another. Solving the challenge depends on an understanding of wave properties and the biology of sight. After being introduced to the challenge, students form ideas and brainstorm about what background knowledge is required to solve the challenge. A class discussion produces student ideas that can be grouped into broad subject categories: waves and wave properties, light and the electromagnetic spectrum, and the structure of the eye.

Students learn about the anatomical structure of the human eye and how humans see light, as well as some causes of color blindness. They conduct experiments as an example of research to gather information. During their investigations, they test other students' vision, gathering data and measurements about when objects appear blurry. These topics help students prepare to design solutions to an overarching engineering challenge question.

In this service-learning engineering project, students follow the steps of the engineering design process to design a hearing testing device. More specifically, they design a prototype machine that can be used to test the peripheral vision of partially-blind, pre-verbal children. Students learn about the basics of vision and vision loss. They also learn how a peripheral vision tester for adults works (by testing the static peripheral vision in the four quadrants of the visual field with four controllable lights in specific locations). Then they modify the idea of the adult peripheral vision tester to make it usable for testing young children. The class designs and builds one complete prototype, working in sub-groups of four or five students each to build sub-components of the project design.

Students apply everything they have learned over the course of the associated lessons about waves, light properties, the electromagnetic spectrum, and the structure of the eye, by designing devices that can aid color blind people in distinguishing colors. Students learn about the engineering design process and develop three possible solutions to the engineering design challenge outlined in lesson 1 of this unit. They create posters to display their three design ideas and the comparisons used to select the best design. Then, students create brochures for their final design ideas, and "sell" the ideas to their "client." Through this activity, students complete the legacy cycle by "going public" with the creation of their informative posters and brochures that explain their designs, as well as color blindness and how people see color, in "client" presentations.

Students are presented with a challenge question concerning color blindness and asked to use engineering principles to design devices to help people who are color blind. Using the legacy cycle as a model, this unit is comprised of five lessons designed to teach wave properties, the electromagnetic spectrum, and the anatomy of the human eye in an interactive format that introduces engineering applications and real-world references. It culminates with an activity in which student teams apply what they have learned to design devices that can aid people with colorblindness in distinguishing colors— as evidenced by their creation of brainstorming posters, descriptive brochures and short team presentations, as if they were engineers reporting to clients. Through this unit, students become more aware of the connections between the biology of the eye and the physical science concept of light, and gain an understanding of how those scientific concepts relate to the field of engineering.