Session:
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Stories, Replicas, & Kits
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Paper Type:
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Invited
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Title:
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An Optical Outreach Kit for School and Community Outreach
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Meeting:
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2014 Summer Meeting: Minneapolis, Minnesota |
Location:
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N/A |
Date:
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Time:
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9:00AM
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Author:
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Justin Spencer, The Bakken Museum
612.926.3878, spencer@thebakken.org
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Co-Author(s):
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Steven Walvig, Martin Wolk
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Abstract:
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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.
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Footnotes:
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None
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Presentation:
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Spencer-AAPT Justin Spencer.pdf
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