Light Reflections

  • Level: Year 3 to Year 6
  • Duration: 60 or 90 minutes (90 minutes recommended)
  • Numbers: Maximum of 30 students
  • State: VIC
  • Price
    60 min: $450
    90 min: $560

Travel surcharge also applies based on location
Prices exclude GST

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Curriculum Links

Victoria New South Wales Australia

Take an in-depth look at the properties of light, from what we can see to what we can’t. Students use a range of optical instruments to investigate reflection, refraction, and colour, explore ultraviolet light, and put their learning into practice by making a UV detection keychain to keep.

Activities

  • Students explore the reflection and refraction of light using mirrors, lenses, and prisms with a light box.
  • Students explore a range of optical instruments and lenses, including a microscope, telescope, Fresnel lens, praxinoscope, and periscope.
  • Students observe how the primary colours of light are mixed to form other colours.
  • Students construct an electrical circuit to light up a bulb, then experiment to find different ways of lighting two bulbs.
  • Students create a whole-class human circuit to light up LEDs.
  • Demonstration of how light energy can be transformed into other types of energy, such as electrical energy.
  • Students observe chemiluminescence.

90 minute workshops also include these activities:

  • Students use UV light to cause a colour change.
  • Each student constructs a UV light detector keychain to keep.

Learning Outcomes

  • Understand that light is a form of energy that travels in waves and moves faster than anything else in the Universe.
  • Recognise that light is essential for vision and for growing plants used as food.
  • Explore how light enters the eye through the pupil, forms an image on the retina, and is transmitted to the brain.
  • Understand that light travels in rays and reflects off smooth, shiny surfaces such as mirrors.
  • Investigate how flat (plane), concave and convex mirrors reflect light in different ways.
  • Explore refraction, where lenses bend light to focus rays at a point, and how lenses are used in optical instruments such as glasses, microscopes and telescopes.
  • Understand that white light is a mixture of colours and that prisms split white light into the visible spectrum.
  • Identify the three primary colours of light—red, green and blue—and explore how they combine to make other colours.
  • Investigate how objects absorb and reflect different colours of light, producing the colours we see.
  • Compare transparent, translucent and opaque materials, and understand how opaque objects cast shadows.
  • Explore how light energy can be transformed into other forms of energy such as electrical or chemical energy (photosynthesis).
  • Understand how electricity can be used to produce light using a complete electrical circuit.
  • Investigate light produced by chemical reactions, including chemiluminescence and bioluminescence.
  • Explore ultraviolet (UV) light and how some materials emit visible light when exposed to UV radiation.

Victorian Curriculum Links

  • Light can be produced from many sources; light travels in a straight path, can form shadows, and can be absorbed, transmitted, reflected or refracted by objects VC2S6U08
  • Materials may be electrical insulators or conductors; energy can be transferred and transformed in electrical circuits where the components of a circuit play particular roles in the function of the circuit VC2S6U09
  • Heat energy can be generated from different sources; temperature changes may happen when heat is transferred from one object to another VC2S4U09
NSW Curriculum Links
  • Describes the characteristics and effects of common forms of energy, such as light and heat (ST2-8PW-ST)
  • Plans and uses materials, tools and equipment to develop solutions for a need or opportunity (ST3-2DP-T)
  • Describes common forms of energy and explores some characteristics of sound energy (ST1-8PW-S)
  • Investigates how forces and energy are used in products (ST1-9PW-ST)
  • Explains how the properties of materials determine their use for a range of purposes (ST3-7MW-T)
Australian Curriculum Links
  • Light from a source forms shadows and can be absorbed, reflected and refracted (ACSSU080)
  • Electrical energy can be transferred and transformed in electrical circuits and can be generated from a range of sources (ACSSU097)
  • Analyse ways to produce designed solutions through selecting and combining characteristics and properties of materials, systems, components, tools and equipment (ACTDEK034)