June 2000
Annual Educational Outreach Meeting

 

"It's a Colorful Life" Color Workshop

The Optical Society of San Diego and this evening's host, Sean Re, are pleased to present a workshop by Dr. Larry Woolf, of General Atomics. At this special educational outreach meeting, Larry will lead us through a series of activities designed to demonstrate aspects of color perception.

The "It's a Colorful Life" workshop uses unique color materials to explore additive and subtractive color mixing, primary colors, and complementary colors through a series of activities. Color models, such as the color wheel, color cube, color diagrams, and color math will be used to explain what we see and to predict the color of stars, semiconductors, water, the sky, and the sun, both at noon and at sunset. Confusing color concepts, such as contradictory color wheels and primary colors, will be explained.

Biography: Lawrence D. Woolf is a physicist at General Atomics. He is actively involved in education outreach activities at GA for grades K-12. (See http://www.sci-ed-ga.org) In addition to tonight's workshop, he developed the educational modules "Seeing the Light: The Physics and Materials Science of the Incandescent Light Bulb," and "Line of Resistance: Using a Graphite Pencil to Explore the Electrical Properties of Materials and Circuits." He also co-developered the "Exploration of Materials Science" and "Chromatics: The Science of Color" modules. He has given over 40 workshops and demonstrations to teachers and students.

June Meeting Review:

San Diego Meeting Focuses on Local Educators
by Jim Menders, Optical Society of San Diego

As part of a program which casts our 9 monthly meetings as a series of themed meetings, we focused on local educators in June. Thirty science teachers from all across San Diego county turned out for a color science workshop and a free pizza dinner. Sean Re, our host for the evening, (who recently traded optical engineering for teaching), was the ideal ambassador to the San Diego science teacher community. The workshop, entitled "It's a Colorful Life" led the audience through a series of activities designed to demonstrate aspects of color perception using filters. This evening's activities also neatly included our annual San Diego Science Fair awards for outstanding optics projects.

Taking advantage of the opportunity to speak directly to an audience of teachers, Sean used the meeting to advertise our optics outreach program to the teachers and upcoming SPIE sponsored workshops for teachers. Over the years, we have collected materials which we loan to teachers, including classroom-sized Optics Discovery Kits and a kit for presenting Douglas Goodman's "Optics Demonstrations Using an Overhead Projector." We frequently give workshops at the annual Science Educators Conference to demonstrate these kits. And this year, we were able to extend an invitation from the SPIE to take part in a free optics workshop put on as a part of their Annual Meeting in San Diego.

Rhonda Mason, chairperson of the 2000 Science Fair committee, presented our annual awards for the best optics projects of the Fair at this meeting. Our awards encourage not only students to take up optics, but also encourage their teachers to teach optics. Each year we hand out cash prizes to 1st and 2nd place winners in the junior and senior division, and present HeNe lasers (donated by our longtime corporate sponsor, Melles Griot Laser Division) to their teachers. We hope that those thirty teachers in our audience will "Go for the RED" (HeNe, that is) next time the science fair rolls around.

Our workshop was led by Larry Woolf, a scientist at General Atomics whose professional duties include the development and presentation of educational outreach modules grades K-12 (see http://www.sci-ed-ga.org). The "It's a Colorful Life" workshop participants received materials which they used to explore additive and subtractive color mixing, primary colors, and complementary colors through a series of activities led by Larry. General Atomics also provided deluxe posters and a guide for the teachers to take back to their classroom.

By the end of the evening, the enthusiasm was evident: science fair optics prize winners vowed to return and teachers wanted to borrow the Discovery Kits. But, will their enthusiasm weather the endless San Diego summer?

Thanks to Martin Teachworth (San Diego Science Educators Association) for publicity and thanks to Dr. Larry Woolfe.