Re: Is there a way to incorporate optical illusions into a science lesson?

Hallo, Laura!

your initiative is really interesting one. I should have been so lucky to
have you as my physics teacher when I was a kid... 

As far as I know, there are two ingredients to the optical illusions: 
1)geometrical optics 
2)human visual cortex interwowen with human psychology.

 The first one is relatively simple to explain to junior students, but is
more or less boring. The other is extremely interesting but since I have no
firm knowledge about it, I am not sure how to demonstrate its workings to
anybody, let alone kids... But I can take a liberty to guess! :)

 I believe that in order to explain the optical illusions, you should be
prepared to take a little detour from the straight path of teaching
elementary school physics. You should tell your audience something about
how human eye works (which, in the end is again physics, although somewhat
more involved than the rods and flywheels and weights) and how our brain
filters the signals that our eyes pick up (this, I believe is the tricky
part).

 I believe it would be a fascinating lecture to the audience you have in
mind, especially as there are so many available nice illusions that can be
displayed during the lecture, which cuts the boring part of copying from
the blackboard to the minimum...

 If my answer was of any help to you, and if you do succeed in making
something out of it, I would be really interested to hear about what you
have done, and how you did it. I have taught physics in elementary school
for a while, and if I ever get a chance to do it again, a sort of lecture
that you have in mind would be a valuable spice to the whole course!

Hope I've been helpful...

Duje Bonacci, BSc of physics
Institute 'Rudjer Boskovic'
Zagreb, Croatia
dbonacci@eskola.hfd.hr