Urban League Summer Camp: Day 2

Unfortunately the kids arrived about 10 minutes late today, so that cut into some of the time for Dr. Pelz's presentation on optical illusions and how the brain interprets imagery. The kids got to try a few "What's the difference?" exercises, as well as view some illusions:

Black Dots: Now you see 'em, now you don't.

It looks like those circles are moving - oh wait, when I look right at them they're not - but- ??!? - AAAAGH

One of the images made so little sense, we were all convinced Dr. Pelz was cheating. Apparently, the table on the left and the table on the right are exactly the same geometrically. He even showed an animation where the table on the left rotated ~90º and shifted over to perfectly overlap the table on the right. We were still skeptical though, so one of the students got up and measured:

Sure enough, they really were the same! Our brain can do some really crazy things.

We also were hypnotized did some neat tricks with motion. We stared at the center of the screen while some hypnotic spirals rotated for about 30 seconds, and then turned to look at each other:

Everything looked all bubbly and warpy! If you haven't tried this trick sometime, you can watch something similar on YouTube.

Because of the time delay, we unfortunately had to postpone the tour of the vision lab to a date TBA. We then viewed all of the images and videos from the scavenger hunt yesterday, with Joe present as an impartial judge. Team Awesome Leroy Jenkins got the most points for valid examples, but Team Taylors traveled the most around campus. In the end, the score came out to be a tie, and everyone was deemed a winner.

In the remaining time, the kids disassembled the cameras I gave them yesterday:

Getting the camera frame apart.

The film and battery have been removed, and the circuit board exposed - now we have to start being careful.

And now for the best part!

(The first part of the video doesn't have sound, but the second clip does.)

Looking through the camera lens.

The camera disassembly as usual proved to be a big hit. One student even took home an extra camera and a set of printed out directions so that he could experiment more at home. Yeah!