The Frozen Project: a 6-year-olds study of crystals…

So what have you discovered under your Foldscope? A prism. (The prism I studied was from an old chandelier, and it was a man made glass crystal.)

I thought you tried that before and it did not work like you expected? Well, last time it was more of a grey day when we tried it. So all we could see was the clear glass and not the separation of light. But this time it was a very sunny day. So we could capture the separation of light.

How did you did you examine the prism? We taped it to the Foldscope. Check out my drawing to see what I mean:

Was it easy to do? No. That is because it is hard to get the light through the Foldscope lens hole and into the prism at the right angle. We had to be very patient to make white light bend into colors.

What were the results? Beautiful rainbows!!

Can you show me some pictures? Sure thing, check out these pictures:

Have you explored anything else? Yes, alum crystals.

What’s that? Vegetables and watermelon rind that is used for pickling. (You can find it in the spice section of the store.)

How did you make the crystals? I mixed the alum powder into warm water. I kept adding powder to the water until the solution would not dissolve more of the powder. Then I put the solution on my glass slide. It took about 2 days for the solution to dry and crystals to form on the slide. Here is what my sketch looks like of what I did:

What were the results? Some beautiful hexagon shaped crystals. And guess what? They made rainbows too!

Check out my video: http://video214.com/play/8xqXOHJImHfbCJl0Z4k69g/s/dark

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Previous posts:

Part-1
Part-2
Part-3
Part-4
Part-5
Part-6