Celebration! We were one of the twenty projects selected for the 2016 Hackaday Prize Design Your Concept competition. We were one of the twenty projects selected for the 2016 Hackaday Prize Design Your oncept competition. The team took a few moments to kick back and savor the victory over snacks.

The discussion quickly turned to next steps. Each of the team members has committed to working through the build instructions and spending some time at the laser cutter to make their own set of components. This is the only way we are going to knock any rough edges off the build process.

Materials on order have started arriving (400 neodymium magnets anyone?). The team discussed where to get optical materials (lasers, lenses, prisms) for putting in the holders on the cheap.

The team then brainstormed ideas for experiments using the optics kit targeted at various age groups: kids, high school, college, and beyond. Five of the simpler experiments were slated for work during the next week.

One of the team is looking into Arduino / Raspberry PI integration of the components for some of the experiments.

Wiki and GitHub organization / editing took up some of the discussion.

We divided the experiments into 4 categories: Research/College/High school/Grade school, and sorted the experiments by level of difficulty. We'll be adding/adjusting these as needed. The categories are not fixed, it was pointed out that an AP high school student could easily set up the college experiments.

College Level

• Measure the speed of light
• Michelson Interferometer
• Polariscope
• Conoscope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conoscopy
• Measuring gravitational pull of the moon using interferometer
• Measuring small masses with the interferometer
• Measure the index of refraction of organic compounds
• Spinthariscope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinthariscope
• Projecting microscope
• Kerr cell

High School Level

• Visible Light Spectrometer
• Simple Microscope
• Sending signals using the laser
• Ronchi test
• Measure focal length of lens

Grade School Level

• Lens Ray Effect Demo (with 3 lasers)
• Simple Projector
• Light Geometry (3 experiments)
• Transmitting energy through space (thermometer)
• Spectrum of light