Color: what, how, and why we see: a workshop for K-12 students and parents

Abstract

Through the ongoing educational outreach activities of the NES/OSA, we have been invited on several occasions to present optics workshops to students of many ages and backgrounds. With a nearly-overwhelming plethora of optics topics that could be presented, we have decided to develop a curriculum on color science that can be presented in a workshop format. Color science was chosen due to the wealth of examples of the application of color within a student's culture, society, technology, and experiences.The goal of the workshop is to teach basic color science by examining objects and events that the students can experience or interact with in their own lives. The curriculum can be scaled to match groups of different sizes and backgrounds as well as to fit within certain time constraints. Depending on logistics, a variety of hands-on demos can be presented, or the workshop can be fully tutorial-based. This curriculum has been presented several times and is constantly evolving based upon each experience.In this paper, we present the portions of the curriculum that have been developed to date. We discuss considerations for adding or removing sections to meet specific workshop constraints. We will also present the evolution of the curriculum from inception to its current state, highlighting the lessons learned from each presentation of the curriculum.