Today I had two online classes in the morning, then I had to get ready for my visit to Wenona School, during the student lunch break when they had their Science Club meeting. I took a laptop loaded with the slide presentation I made yesterday.
After checking in at reception, I met the head of the science department, who escorted me into the science labs. These are in a very new building, and were super modern. We chatted a bit while waiting for the classes to end and lunch time to begin, then moved into one of the rooms where the girls in the Science Club would assemble. I set up my laptop to project on the screen.
The audience was about twenty girls from I think Years 8 through 11, plus several of their science teachers, and the lab assistant. I did my talk about human vision and cameras, showing the links between the biology and physics and going into details about colour vision and perception. I had to cut short the end to finish on time, since we started a few minutes late (the students were getting lunches and arrived in dribs and drabs).
Then we had question time. The first three questions from students were:
- How does colour blindness work? I was happy to hear this, as one of the slides I’d stopped short of was specifically about this, showing how missing one type of cone cell in the eyes can make it impossible/difficult to distinguish red and green
- Do we know if people are really seeing the same colours if they look at the same things? Oh my gosh… Believe it or not, this was exactly what another of the skipped slides was about! I moved ahead to that one and explained what we do and don’t know about this idea.
- I heard this species of shrimp can see lots more colours than we can; how does that work? Okay, wow. I didn’t specifically have a slide on the mantis shrimp, but I did have one on tetrachromacy in birds, which is essentially the same thing, just not as extreme.
So that was amazing and really good. As the students left, some of them came up to me and said they really enjoyed the talk, and the teachers did too. So over all it was a great success.
The head of science then took me to a quiet room where we could talk about ongoing projects and how I could help. The Year 9 students are doing term projects on light, and could use some ideas and assistance with organising their projects. We ran through some of the fledgling ideas and I offered advice on what was doable and what might be tricky, and gave some suggestions for extending things in different ways. She seemed really happy with that, and our plans to work together this year.
One other thing: I found out their head of science studied physics at Sydney University, and was doing her undergraduate degree when I was doing my Ph.D. So there’s a chance that I actually taught her in the physics labs! Neither of us remembered each other, but it’s highly possible.