Visible Light
Light, Sound and Waves
Thinking about actions to take: Colours of Two Kinds
Teaching Guidance
for 11-14
There's a good chance you could improve your teaching if you were to:
Try these
- separating perceptual and spectral colours
- introducing and exploiting a simple account of colour vision
- introducing filtering colours as a process of removing certain frequencies
- preferring frequency to wavelength
- explaining in detail, on several occasions, why something appears the colour that it does
- bringing to mind the psychological aspects of colour perception, perhaps by showing a few well chosen illusions
Teacher Tip: Work through the Physics Narrative to find these lines of thinking worked out and then look in the Teaching Approaches for some examples of activities.
Avoid these
- conflating adding and removing frequencies
- subtracting colours
- trying to explain the rainbow, for most classes
- reducing the complex processes of colour perception to simple physical principles
Teacher Tip: These difficulties are distilled from: the research findings; the practice of well-connected teachers with expertise; issues intrinsic to representing the physics well.