Skittles Game
Overview: The sun (and most indoor and outdoor lighting) casts our world in white light. White light allows us to see all the colors in the color spectrum. When we take away all the colors, except one, from white light we are left with what is called monochromatic light. Monochromatic light makes it very difficult to discern colors from each other.
Supplies: Skittles (or other colored candy. MnMs, jelly beans, gummy bears, etc also work), cups, low pressure sodium lamp
Objectives: Separate the candies into piles by color
Setup:
- Take the large sodium lamp and plug it into a power strip
- Place 20-30 skittles in cups
How to run the demo:
- Turn on the sodium lamp
- Hand each person a cup of skittles
- Have them try to separate the skittles by color. There are 5 skittles colors, so have them try to separate the skittles into 5 groups. This will be challenging because the monochromatic yellow light makes all of the skittles look yellow or brown.
- Turn the room lights back on and see how everyone did! White light flashlights can also be used for individual stations
What’s Happening?
This lamp is just like the sodium-vapor street lamps that appear yellow that you can still see in some places around Tucson. Sodium lamps are monochromatic, or single color, light sources that falls in the yellow region of the wavelength spectrum. Because the lamp is only one wavelength of color, yellow, all objects illuminated by the lamp will reflect only yellow back to our eyes. Trying to distinguish differences between colored objects under the monochromatic light is a difficult task.
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