STEAMLabs Hackney: Projects
LightLab: Shining a light on Creative Science
Creating a sweet wave…
LightLab was held over two days during the Easter break 2022. Thanks to the support from Westfield East Bank Creative Futures Fund, funded by Westfield Stratford City and delivered by Foundation for Future London we were able to reach out to many children who may not otherwise have been able to attend.
On the first day, the children learned about light and went on to construct sweet waves which demonstrated light’s wave properties. They then explored what happened to light when it interacts with a medium. They learned about reflection and refraction through lenses and prisms. They took whacky photographs of refraction images and produced artworks based on rainbows. Finally, the children investigated transparent, translucent and opaque objects and then made a hanging glass and ceramic mosaic, based loosely on a wave shape, which included examples of all three.
During the second day, the children investigated reflection and refraction photography in more detail. They went on to create periscopes which meant they could to look over or around structures without being seen. Once they had finished with their periscopes, they made small fairground mirrors to investigate reflection in concave and convex surfaces creating amusing distorted images of themselves. The final session used Sphero Bolt robots to mimic the motion of light waves passing through a medium by tracing out the light rays
