RE: pinhole camera at science fair

My daughter's elementary school organizes a family science night each year.
They do things like make rockets powered by vinegar and soda, balancing
experiment, a dentist had the kids do imprints of their teeth, etc. Each
activity lasts 25 minutes, so families can do several activities.

I organized a "pinhole optics" event that didn't use photography, but used
pinholes as a proof that our eyes see with lenses. Each kid made a pinhole
in the typical way and taped it to a 1 x 5 inch piece of heavy mat board to
make an occluder - a pinhole on a stick. We looked at the palms of our
hands and brought them to our faces until the palm prints were blurry.
Holding our hand in the same position, we looked at them and the palm prints
became clear. We did this with printed pages, too. Us older folks with
glasses took them off and looked through the pinholes at distant blurry
objects - and they became clearer. This proves that the pinhole forms an
images and cast it onto our eye.

As an additional proof, I took a bunch of those little plastic bug-eye or
kaleidoscope cones that you can get at party and toy stores. I scratched
simple nouns, verbs and endings on the plastic lenses of thirty or forty
cones (backwards! it is a little tricky). When you look through the cones
with your eye only, you see the multiple or distorted images. When you look
through the cones with the pinhole, you can see the secret word, too. This
is because the eye can't focus on objects as close to the eye as the lens
is. The pinhole can do this, demonstrating that the eye uses lenses and
that the pinhole is an optical device.

By looking through the cones in the order of noun-verb-noun-ending, the
students can make silly sentences like "teachers kiss frogs often" or "boys
like girls a lot."

All this without a darkroom! I had a table set up with many of my home-made
cameras and the photos that they made, including multiple pinhole cams,
distorted film plane cams and two-slit photos.

This was for 3rd - 5th Graders, but should work for 6th as well.

Tom

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-pinhole-discussion@spitbite.org [mailto:owner-
> pinhole-discussion@spitbite.org] On Behalf Of Gordon J.
> Holtslander
> Sent: Wednesday, January 23, 2008 3:06 PM
> To: pinhole-discussion@spitbite.org
> Subject: [pinhole-discussion] pinhole camera at science fair
>
> Hi all:
>
> My daughter has decided to do a project on pinhole cameras at her
> grade 6
> science fair.
>
> They need to do experimental sort of work - not just make a
> pinhole camera and
> show their pictures.
>
> I've suggested obvious things - determining the effect of
> different pinhole
> sizes, distance of film from pinhole, alignment of film in
> camere, different
> camera designs.
>
> Any other pinhole experiments a couple of grade six students
> could do?
> --
> Gordon J. Holtslander Dept. of Biology
> gordon.holtslander@usask.ca University of Saskatchewan
> Tel (306) 966-4433 112 Science Place
> FAX (306) 966-4461 Saskatoon, SK
> homepage.usask.ca/~gjh289 Canada, S7N 5E2
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Received on Thu Jan 24 05:44:54 2008