This paper presents an approach based on a laser interferometer set-up to perform an experimental study of Hooke’s law for the case of the bending of a cantilever beam. We used weights and a pulley to deform the beam laterally and measured displacement with an electronic speckle pattern interferometer (ESPI). The ESPI set-up was built using items commonly found in an undergraduate optics laboratory and the software used for the measurement as presented in this paper is available for anyone to use. This represents an attempt at content development with an ESPI; development of various types of content with ESPIs can broaden the horizons of higher education and enhance classroom environments.

In recent years, substantial progress has been made in black hole visualization. However, there is a lack of essential up-to-date information regarding black holes in current school curricula, in spite of students’ substantial interest in black holes. In this study, we examined the implications of the Event Horizon Telescope project, a recent achievement of the scientific community, for science education. An analysis of the black hole visualization research process, based on Giere’s scientific reasoning model, revealed that there are two categories of the black hole visualization processes: visualization through prediction based on a theory and visualization through real-world observation data. Black hole images are not merely scientific outputs that students must memorize; rather, they can be a useful resource for learning the nature of science and the characteristics of scientific reasoning.

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