With sciences sometimes it can be a bit of a challenge to come up with ‘cool’ ways to demonstrate what would normally be boring. I remember my high school chemistry teacher (You know the guy the one that wore cheazy plaid slacks and a bow-tie…) trying to wow us as he poured two chemicals together and they turned purple…. FLOP! Seriously as a kid I wanted sparks and explosions, and you try and show me a color change… really? Thhbbttt!

So lets get into how lenses work, and we dont want to be frying up a little ant farm with the sun and potentially lighting the house on fire…. What can one do… Let Dave and Brody at MechanicalMashup show us how to turn our house into a camera… wait what?!?!?! Yes your read that correctly how to turn a house into a camera. In the end it cost him a few sheets of posterboard and a donation from a local optician. Now how many of your kids can tell us what a ‘diopter’ is and how to calculate the focal length of a lens….

Enjoy and go out and have some fun with your kids. Listen in the video how excited Brody got when they got it working. Now that is cool science! 

In the words of Brody:

That is… That’s MAGNIFICENT! 

What are you going to do now? How about take this tutorial and build it. Get a big sheet of paper and put it on the wall that the camera projects on to and trace the scene and color it….

If you do tackle the project send us pictures, video, anything and we will feature you at our site. But most of all go and enjoy science it does not have to be boring.

~Ben