Room 10 Makes Handheld Rainbow!

Room 10 students were asked to design a machine that creates rainbows in shopping malls. This posed the question.  How do you create a rainbow? 

We knew from our guided reading sessions that rainbows occur naturally when it is raining and the sun is shining. In order for this to happen you need to have the sun behind you and the rain falling in front of you. This allows the light to be reflected from the very tiny rain drops back towards the viewer in the form of a rainbow. 

So how do you take something that occurs naturally in the sky and recreate it? 

First we tried a glass of water and held it up with the sun behind us to see if it would work? No! So then we tried pouring it out. Still no rainbow.

Next we tried a hose to recreate the effect of rain. We found that the finer the spray the better the rainbow. Students also observed that you could see the rainbow from different angles. 

From this, Room 10 students came up with some designs that they thought could be used to help create a rainbow inside a shopping mall while also staying dry. They also thought that this could be great Science Fair Project idea, especially the art of creating a double rainbow! 

In reality it is quite easy to recreate a rainbow if you know how they form in real life!