Vision and Perception

Seb made this "3-D" Rubick's Cube, using perspective to make it look more real. He got the idea from this video.

We had a unit entirely on Illusion last year, and it was fun to revisit and expand on some of the optical illusions we talked about then, for our study of Vision and Perception. We watched this short video on "Magic and the Brain," and talked about why it is that our brain interprets the world the way it does, to allow it to be fooled. Our brains are so amazing! We realized that again and again during this unit.

We really liked this movie called "The Boy Who Sees Without Eyes," about a blind boy who uses echolocation to move and navigate the world. He does amazingly well! But the movie also brought up some interesting ideas about self-sufficiency and what constitutes real success in life. We recommend it!

Here it is from the side; you can see how elongated it actually is.

Optical Illusions; Thaumatropes

We talked a lot during this week about how our senses can be tricked or misled through various methods. The children really enjoyed our day on Optical Illusions. We studied M.C. Escher and Julian Beever, and looked at several simple optical illusions like the ones above. It's pretty amazing how easily our eyes can be fooled!

We had tons of fun making thaumatropes; in fact, we could hardly get ourselves to stop! We found the instructions in one of our library books, and I can't find something exactly like it online. (There are lots of tutorials for this kind, though.) For ours, we took 3x5 index cards and cut them in half. We drew a small picture on one side, and then, exactly opposite it on the other side (we held the cards up to the window if we needed to see through), we drew another picture that would interact with the first one. So, for example, our first side was a small fish, and the second side was a fishbowl big enough to contain him. We taped the two half-cards back to back on a straw. The idea is that when you spin the straw back and forth between your hands fast enough, your eyes combine the pictures and the fish goes into the bowl!

The fish went so nicely into his bowl that we began to burst with other ideas. You can see that we made a whole bunch! Here are some of the other pictures the children came up with:
A baby penguin standing on his daddy penguin's feet
A cat walking on top of a fence
The "Y" appearing on Y Mountain
A cookie going into a person's mouth
A rainbow appearing in a cloud
A cloud of ash emerging from a volcano
A bear going into his cave
A bird going into his nest
A monkey going into his tree
A bunny going into his hat

These thaumatropes were so cute! We loved playing with them.

Illusion Unit, and Magician's Hats

This unit was for Abe's birthday week, so he got to choose the topic. He said he wanted either Magic or Computers. I modified "magic" a  bit, to get this Illusion unit. I wanted to make sure we had a broad range of things we could cover, in case we got tired of doing magic tricks all day long. Also I found a really cool book on theater at the library, which I knew the kids would love, and for a field trip, we scheduled a tour of the Hale Center Theater too. 

Side note: The HCT (the one by us in West Valley) is the most amazing place. Because they're a theater-in-the-round, they have to be creative with their sets, but they don't scale back at all---they have moving platforms and trapdoors and overhead scenery and everything you can think of. The tour didn't show us as much as the children would have liked of the hydraulics, etc., but the set designer was really nice and said we could come back and see more sometime (they were building a new set while we were there and the downstairs was too dangerous for visitors). They described some of their past sets and said when they did Treasure Island, they filled the whole stage area with a 12-foot-deep tank of water. The set was made up of boats that floated on it, and people were diving in and out during the play. What?!? It's my everlasting regret that we didn't go see it. Anyway---all that was part of stage illusion, and it was really interesting.

We made these magician's hats on the first day of the unit. You just cut out a long rectangle of posterboard, roll it into a cylinder, and then cut a small circle for the top and a big donut-shape for the bottom. They turned out cute, and the children played Magician with them all week. Fun.