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  Session: Stories, Replicas, & Kits
  Paper Type: Invited
  Title: An Optical Outreach Kit for School and Community Outreach
  Meeting: 2014 Summer Meeting: Minneapolis, Minnesota
  Location: N/A
  Date:
  Time: 9:00AM
  Author: Justin Spencer, The Bakken Museum
612.926.3878, spencer@thebakken.org
  Co-Author(s): Steven Walvig, Martin Wolk
  Abstract: We present a collaborative effort between 3M and The Bakken Museum to create a science encouragement kit for the 3M Visiting Wizards program. The program is part of a long 3M tradition that provides teaching materials and training to employees for science outreach in schools, science fairs, and other public venues. The kit was designed to teach a few fundamental principles of classical optics through the history of the camera obscura. Camera obscuras have been used for centuries as a means of projecting an image of the real world onto a surface, usually a canvas, so that it may be copied or studied. The use of the device in the paintings of Vermeer and other painters (the “Hockney-Falco Thesis”) is a hotly debated topic that is woven into the kit. As one of a few dozen kits created and used by 3M employees, this portable kit includes a collapsible black tent (the camera), a variable aperture and lens assembly (the pinhole and lens), an efficient collimated LED light source, and retroreflective garments, graphics, and eyeglasses. A laser pointer on a gimbal is used as an auxiliary part of the kit to teach the principle of image inversion in pinhole optics.
  Footnotes: None
  Presentation: Spencer-AAPT Justin Spencer.pdf

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