The children taken to the National Media Museum in Bradford, chose a Kinora Viewer - an early hand held device for showing short movies by flicking through a batch of still images shot at a rate of around 16 per second. The object, designed by Auguste and Louis Lumiere, provides a magical way into understanding how humans and other animals see things move.
The short film and teachers lesson plan cover the KS2 requirements on how light travels as well as explaining recent discoveries by scientists studying the perception of movement.
There was no room to include this additional short film showing a real-life example of the 'false face' phenomenon explored in the lesson...
This outake footage was made during the CultureStreet (formerly 'ArtisanCam') feature on the major exhibition by Jaume Plensa at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park.
The wire-frame film in the CultureStreet resource...
...offers two demonstrations of how the images we see are produced in our brain. The resource doesn't credit the scientist who first realised how vision actually works. It is worth pupils knowing about him even if the National Curriculum ignores his existence.
In the ancient world, many thought that sight was caused by the eyes sending out beams of light to the objects we then see. Even bright chaps like Plato rated this theory. Others believed that objects emitted tiny physical copies of themselves that entered our eyes (so a table would be constantly beaming out streams of nano-tables).
The discovery of what we now regard as the correct theory is credited to the Muslim scientist Ibn al-Haytham, born in Basra in 965 AD (354 AH).
He was the first to explain how rays of light entered the eye, are focused on the retina an how the optic nerve carries the information deeper into the brain where the image is perceived.
Professor Jim Al-Khalili has a useful article about Ibn al-Haytham at
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