ABOUT
Colorize is a project at CMU’s Entertainment Technology Center with a goal to create hardware prototypes and documentation for activities that will introduce elementary school students in K- 2nd grade to the colors of the light spectrum and light color mixing. The project is being built for West Liberty University’s Center for Arts and Education.
The Center for Art and Education at West Liberty University is our client that worked with us through out the semester.
Kathryn Nelson
Teaching Assistant
Center for Arts and Education
Lisa Mcgee
Teaching Assistant
Center for Arts and Education
We have been building 4 hardware prototypes that aim to engage kids.
LED Light Strip
In this activity the children can press the red, green and blue buttons to light up a light on the LED strip that color. Filling up the lightstrip causes a short light show to happen and then musical notes will play with there being a different note per color. Multiple buttons can be pressed to combine the colors and get new notes. All three buttons pressed will make white light which is silent and can break up the music. There is provided music notation that will play a few common children’s songs
Shadow Puppet
This activity has 3 lights: red, green and blue. They should be aimed at a white or clean surface. The children can then use shadow puppets to see how they react to the light and see how the shadows are colored. This is a more open-ended activity to let kids get curious about how light works and create their own stories. Using the provided powerstrip you can switch on and off individual lights to show different combinations.
Whiteboard Activity
The whiteboard activity allows kids to control a light by turning on and off the red, green and blue channels separately and to see how those colors shining on the board affects the colors in the drawings they made. Some colors change while others can seem to disappear altogether. They can turn on multiple at a time to mix colors to either mix 2 colors together or all 3 to create white. Looking at the DMX light (though not directly) shows which RGB channels are on, allowing the kids to see actual lights mixing into colors.
Make A Rainbow – WIP
This activity has a strip of 4 LEDs that fills in as you press the red green or blue buttons. Once the strip is filled in the colors combine into each other and are output to one of the 3 strips above it. You then repeat the process until all 3 strips are filled. Then a light show of the colors you’ve created is played. This activity allows tertiary colors to be created.
We have conducted 5 playtests in total with about 60 kids of our target demographic across 4 playtesting sites.
