The Amazing Race: Speed of Light Reflection

This semester marks my last contribution to planning and participating in events as a member of STEMComm. The last two semesters were eventful, and I always enjoyed helping plan out the logistics by being a team player. However, this semester’s challenge was to lead a group activity planning for a topic that I was not quite familiar with.

For the Atlanta Science Festival, we organized an Amazing Race event. Each group planned both a mental and physical activities for our participants to choose from. My group choose an interesting topic, optics, focusing specifically on light and color. Being a computational media major who works on designing user experiences, I had never quite dealt with any so physics related, so it was kind of difficult to brainstorm actual activities that would be engaging. In previous events that I helped planned, my group always considered how accessible resources were before finalizing any details. This was the same case for my group this semester.

Our physical proposal idea was to plan an event related to light, which lead to having the participants bend light with prisms. We knew that prisms made out of glass can analyze and reflect light, and paired with a laser beam, light would become refractured. As one of our learning objectives, we had a hands on activity with refraction by having the participant use a laser, a single wavelength, and prisms to create a path where the light had to bounce off of all the prisms. Additionally, although we didn’t have a natural white light, our other learning objective was dispersion, when different wavelengths bend differently, splitting white light into colors.

For the mental activity, I wanted it to be correlated with colors. After some researching, I found the stroop effect, with learning objectives aligning with how our brain processes color and text simultaneously when presented with both visually. The Stroop effect occurs because reading is automatic, but naming colors requires more effort, causing delays with conflicting words. When presented with incongruent stimuli, which is a situation where two aspects of a stimulus contradict each other, like seeing the word “red” written in blue ink, the idea is that you take longer to process. Your anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), located in the medial wall of the frontal lobe, helps resolve this conflict, showing more activity with incongruent color-word pairs versus the congruent color-word pairs such as the word “red” written in red ink. To recreate this, I used Figma, a design tool that I used often, to create this activity. Being able to combine design and science was very fun and it made me become more motivated.

On the day we had to execute our plan, it went way better than I had expected. I could see the reminiscing of younger days on older participants as they watched their kids engage with the prisms and light. We presented our learning objectives and then had them complete short quiz. Although the stroop effect didn’t get as much attention as the prisms, we had a psychologist who administers this mental activity for their patients explain more in depth the processing with incongruent and congruent stimuli and other test variations. We also got swamped with many groups arriving at the same time, but we adjusted by splitting our group into two and running either the mental or physical activity. This event was truly an insightful experience and I learned many valuables skills that went beyond science.

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