Colors of light

Monday opened with The Limits of Light as an introduction to the electromagnetic spectrum. Wednesday a cold open was again used. While Niki's Indigo was playing, students who were still  arriving were handed CD spectroscopes and asked to list the colors they saw in the order in which they saw them.


After class the realization landed that Indigo should be a playlist of variations on the song to run as background music to the whole opening.


Full length gray even including the shoes. 

Demonstrating that the shirt is indeed gray under the microscope.Then the photo of the shirt was taken with a Motorola Moto cell phone and placed under the microscope. No more gray. Just red, green, and blue.

This term no videos were shown, although the new indigo playlist was running while students looked into the microscope. Then the physiology of vision was explained using the white board. 


Later in the period the HSV color system was introduced as seen above. 

Viewing the gray shirt under the microscope.

This term students were instructed to work in pairs with one phone displaying the questions in Moodle and the other phone displaying Desmos. 

All but one of the students had a mobile device or laptop

Maicalany working on her phone

Some students chose to work solo

For the 11:00 section a second new playlist was developed that featured songs with color names. As each song started anything that had that color was photographed. 

For orange, the orange triangles were photographed. Then the student with that color was invited to view the color on the cell phone under the microscope. Other students also viewed the color under the microscope. This worked moderately well, but some songs were longer than necessary.  Whether this should be done in the future is an open question. In some sense the yellow Sphagneticola trilobata flowers are sufficient to demonstrate the RGB nature of cell phone screens. 

Again, having the students work in pairs was done at 11:00, with students permitted to separately submit the shared answer document. 

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