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7/30/2019 Making Rainbows with prisms
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THE SCIENCE LAB
Make & Do Activity Kit
500 Harris St Ultimo
PO Box K346 Haymarket NSW 1238
Australia
Tel: 02 6217 0111
http://play.powerhousemuseum.com
This work is licensed under the Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-
ShareAlike 2.5 License.
Making rainbows
A rainbow is created rom water and light. Make adierent shaped rainbow in this experiment by
using dierent shaped prisms.
Time:15 min +
Difculty:Hint: Did you know raindrops are prismsthat create a rainbow in the sky?
Place a sheet o white paper
on the ground in ront o a
sunny window. Place a box
on its tall side at the edge
o the paper where its top is
in the sun.
1.
Place one o your containers
on top o the box. Fill it with
water until 2cm rom the
top. It should sit in the sun
and hang slightly over the
edge o the box as shown.
2.
Observe the paper on
the foor. Rainbows and
refections should appear.
3.
With adult help try moving
and tipping the container
slightly to experiment with
dierent eects on the
paper.
4.
Pour the water into a
dierent shaped container.
Each shape will result in
dierent eects. Can you
guess why?
5.
What colours can you
identiy in the rainbows you
have created on the paper?
6.
500 Harris St. Ultimo
PO Box K346 Haymarket NSW 1238Australia Tel: 02 9217 0111
http://play.powerhousemuseum.com
Creative Commons Licence for use of this work
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Australia Licence (CC BY-NC 3.0 AU)
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/au/
What you will need:
various sized glass orclear plastic containers
a large piece o white
paper
a stream o sunshine water
a cardboard box or
similar
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7/30/2019 Making Rainbows with prisms
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Page 2
500 Harris St Ultimo
PO Box K346 Haymarket NSW 1238
Australia
Tel: 02 6217 0111
http://play.powerhousemuseum.com
This work is licensed under the Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-
ShareAlike 2.5 License.
THE SCIENCE LAB
Make & Do Activity Kit
Making rainbows
What else can I do?
Torch Rainbows
By using a torch as the light source instead o the
sunlight you can achieve similar results.
You will need the ollowing materials:
* dierent shaped glass or clear plastic containers
* water
* a torch
* a chair
Instructions:
1. Take your equipment into a darkened room.
2. Fill one o the containers with water and place it
on the chair acing a wall.
3. Turn on your torch and shine it through the
container. Move it around until you have ound a
point where you have created a rainbow.
4. Dierent shaped containers will create dierent
eects. Experiment by liting the containers and
shining it through the bottom.
Whats going on?
Rainbow shapes
A rainbows shape is created by
the shape o the prism that thelight passes through. A rainbow is made up o the
ollowing colours; red, orange, yellow, green, blue,
indigo and violet. This is called the visible spectrum.
The visible spectrum
The dierent colours that make up white light can
be seen when a ray o light hits a prism and is
divided. A prism is any transparent object with very
fat suraces that reracts light, such as glass or
water. The prism makes the dierent wavelengths
bend by dierent amounts. It then spreads them out
in a spectrum, or a rainbow o colours.
Wavelengths
The longest wavelength is red. The shortest is
blue and violet. All the other colours are arranged
in between these two wavelengths. I all the
wavelengths are o equal amounts then they are
mixed together to make white light.
500 Harris St. UltimoPO Box K346 Haymarket NSW 1238
Australia Tel: 02 9217 0111
http://play.powerhousemuseum.com
Creative Commons Licence for use of this workThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial 3.0 Australia Licence (CC BY-NC 3.0 AU)
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/au/
