New Acropolis in Slovenia once again participated in the summer festival Artkamp in the main park of Maribor. The goal of our workshop was to teach children (and their parents) the laws of physics, this time the laws of optics – in the context of the International Year of Light.

With some simple experiments children learned how our eyes work, how the camera works, how we can make a simple microscope and a simple telescope and how they work, how refraction and reflection of light work and more. The children could also make a kaleidoscope and periscope by themselves. One part of the workshop also dealt with optical illusions.

When dealing with light, one finds out that our sense organs can be deceiving. They give us information about the external world, which is not indisputable truth … A picture we see, for example, can be just a reflection of an object which is not really there. The colour we see, may seem different to us if we set it in another environment … This can make us start questioning ourselves: what is the world we see and what is reality? We once again showed that physics is not boring and that we can find wonderful and interesting laws of it everywhere – if we just look around ourselves and have the will to investigate.