Byron Center — Nickels Intermediate sixth-graders discovered during a recent science lesson lights in the shape of jack-o-lanterns, bats, snowflakes and Santa Claus in teacher Eric Krusniak’s classroom.
“You don’t need anything but your eyes,” he said as students filed in for one of three light-and-color lab rotations.
To the naked eye, the classroom appeared dark, lit only by several strands of lights strung across the walls. But when sixth-graders put on their diffraction glasses — similar to paper 3D glasses or those worn to view a solar eclipse — they saw different holiday shapes when looking directly at the lights.
“This is so trippy,” one student exclaimed while moving the glasses on and off his face to see the lights transform into shapes.
Noah Bastic explained that the tiny slits on the glasses’ lenses scattered the light when he looked through them, breaking up the colors into many smaller lights.
“Just pieces of plastic (in the glasses) can change how you see things,” Eloise Bromley said. “But you can’t wear them too long, or your eyes start to hurt.”
The experiment was part of the sixth-grade physical science unit “Can I Believe My Eyes?” Krusniak said the scientific principles studied were what happens when light is absorbed, white light compared to the absence of light, how light filters, and how colored objects can absorb and transmit different colors.
Krusniak further explained to sixth-graders how different light sources, such as colored lights or fluorescent bulbs, determine the spectrum of colors and shapes they saw when looking through their glasses. For example, white light is made up of all colors of the visible light spectrum: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet.
Next door in Lindsey Fonnesbeck’s classroom, another group of sixth-graders sat in the dark and saw how red, blue and green light bulbs cast color-blended shadows on the whiteboard.
At their third station, the young scientists learned about light absorption, reflection and transmission. There, teacher Kari Sipple asked the group, “When I shine this laser, why can’t we see the light between the laser and the wall?”
Several students agreed it was because the air is “too clean,” which meant there were no surfaces for the light to scatter off from.
To her students’ surprise, Sipple tossed copious amounts of baby powder into the air at the front of the room and aimed the laser through the cloud.
“Whoas” and applause erupted as the students could see green beams of light shining across the room.
Following the demonstration, they experimented on their laptops with a light filter simulator. Zoey Diaz placed a blue filter over a blue light and predicted, “I think the light will just be blue.”
When she placed the blue filter over a red light, however, Zoey said the light appeared black, because “the blue filter absorbs blue light,” which wasn’t present, so no light was absorbed or transmitted.
Read more from Byron Center:
• Fourth-grade writers share personal narratives
• Sixth-graders mark Hispanic Heritage Month
