Offers Deep Dives into the Science of Light & Color
Community Review for Light & Color by Tinybop
My Take
A+ open-ended tool. I found the handbook a particularly solid resource that helped me organize my thoughts on the subject. I wish there was a version of the handbook geared towards children maybe in the form of handouts etc so that we could get a sense of what kids are getting from their time in the app. The app itself run off late model ipads is excellent. Our kids use it alone and in groups and often come back to it over time. The ability to switch languages was helpful with some of our children who have English as a second language.
How I Use It
Light and Color is the best digital teaching aide I've found to help explain both science and art concepts around light and color to children.
Science topics include: the ability of light to move, reflect and refract. The idea that light is made up of different colors. How rainbows are formed. Perception of light by different creatures.
Art topics include color sorting by saturation, paint mixing, light mixing, the idea that color names are subjective, color's connection to emotion, and color matching.
I've used this app both in art and science class. The app is almost wordless so the kids ask a lot of questions, but they are good questions, and if you follow a child-centered approach it's a great app to provoke conversation.
In art class I used the app to demonstrate color mixing before giving kids actual colors so they could test and see how the real world matched the approximation. We also used the light mixing part of the app to help explain this difficult concept.
The color mixing part of the app helped me explain concepts of saturation, gradients, tone, shade, complementary colors and so on. There is little in app explanation so I still had to teach the concept, but this is a great model to play with.
My kids loved the color naming part of the app and the AR was especially fun.
The science sections of the app were extremely helpful tools for me to explore hard-to-explain concepts. The only major topic missing were the spectrum/wavelenths.
The animal perception was fun. The only criticism here is that kids always want more animals.