optics

This page is to accompany the 7th Grade Optics workshop held at the Riverside County Office of Education and UC Riverside on June 29 and 30, 2011. This workshop was made possible by a grant from SPIE. We spent 14 hours with 7th grade teachers learning how to teach the optics standards included in the life science curriculum Teachers took home an optics kit and power supply and toured several optics research labs at UC Riverside.



Feel free to post questions on the discussion link above. The powerpoint and worksheet can be downloaded below.

[|7thGradeOptics.ppt]

Link to SPIE Optics Grant

Ray Diagrams Worksheet: [|RayDiagramsWorksheet.doc]

Video of a laser at UCR creating a plasma ball thanks to Kathy! [|IMG_0093.MOV]

Link to optics kit used for UCR demonstrations: http://www.edmundoptics.com/onlinecatalog/displayproduct.cfm?productid=1865

Here are some pictures and videos in no particular order: Our wonderful UCR hosts doing optics demonstrations for us. Demonstrating polarization and scattering. Showing how a pinhole inverts an image. These flashlights are easily adjustable, bright and able to be collimated. Great for demos. The is a green laser forcing a yellow dye to make it into a dye laser.

media type="file" key="LASERPlasma.MOV" width="300" height="300" Here's a nano-second pulsed 6 Watt laser being focused and heating the air up to 5,000 degrees making a small ball of plasma!

We also toured a lab where they produce positronium (antimatter) and study its spectrum by hitting it with lasers. This is the kit that we used to learn about lenses, mirrors, ray diagrams, and color mixing.

Look at this optics bench! I'd hate to draw a ray diagram of that!

Teachers hard at work tracing rays with their ray boxes and drawing ray diagrams. The other half of the room also working hard. Three rays passing through a plano-convex converging lens. We also toured some of the undergraduate physics labs.