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CD Spinner
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In this activity, learners create a simple “top” from a CD, marble and bottle cap, and use it as a spinning platform for a variety of illusion-generating patterns.
Amazing Albedo
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In this experiment, learners work in teams to investigate how the color of a surface influences its ability to reflect light and therefore heat.
Rotating Light
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In this activity, learners explore what happens when polarized white light passes through a sugar solution.
Water Illusions: Refraction & Magnification
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Learners demonstrate how water can distort, refract and magnify light.
Bubble Tray
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In this activity, learners use simple materials to create giant bubbles.
Iridescent Art
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This is a quick activity (on page 2 of the PDF under Butterfly Wings Activity) that illustrates how nanoscale structures, so small they're practically invisible, can produce visible/colorful effects.
Make a Prism
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In this activity, learners will make their own prism and use a glass of water to separate sunlight into different colors.
Glue Stick Sunset
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In this activity, learners explore why the sky is blue. Learners model the scattering of light by the atmosphere, which creates the blue sky and red sunset, using a flashlight and clear glue sticks.
Bird in the Cage
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In this activity about afterimages, learners explore what happens when receptor cells called cones in your eye's retina get tired.
How Our Environment Affects Color Vision
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In this lab (Activity #1 on page), learners explore how we see color.
Kaleid-o-mania
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In this hands-on activity, learners build their own kaleidoscopes and explore how light can reflect of off surfaces such as mirrors, to produce beautiful patterns.
Three Colors of Light
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Have fun with additive mixing! Observe what happens when the three primary colors of light--red, green and blue--are mixed together, resulting in white light.
Gray Step
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In this activity, learners discover that it's difficult to distinguish between two different shades of gray when they aren't separated by a boundary.
Sliding Gray Step
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How can you make one shade of gray look like two? By putting it against two different color backgrounds! This activity allows learners to perform this sleight of hand very easily.
Give and Take
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In this activity, learners explore liquid crystals, light and temperature. Using a postcard made of temperature-sensitive liquid crystal material, learners monitor temperature changes.
Canned Heat
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In this activity, learners explore how light and dark colored objects absorb the Sun's radiations at different rates.
Benham's Disk
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In this activity, learners make a Benham Top to explore visual illusions and optics.
Chromatography
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In this activity (page 3 of the PDF), learners will observe a physical change.
CD Spectrometer
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In this activity, learners use a compact disc to make a spectrometer, an instrument used to measure properties of light.
Seeing in the Dark
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In this activity (17th on the page), learners investigate why you cannot see colors in dim light.