written by Rebecca E. Vieyra and Caroline Hall

This cross-disciplinary lesson blends physics, chemistry, and life science as students use liquid from glow sticks to investigate RGB color addition. The purpose of the activity is to promote understanding of the difference between mixing the primary colors of light (red, green, and blue) and mixing paint pigment, as well as the nature of light. Activated glow sticks are light-emitting objects; thus, mixing different glow stick colors will produce RGB color addition, which is not possible with paint or other pigmented light-reflecting objects. This lesson was inspired by the following articles in The Physics Teacher journal: "Glow Sticks: Spectra and Color Mixing", by J. Birriel and I. Birriel; and "As Easy as R.B.G.", by L. Parsons.

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Published July 15, 2016
Last Modified June 2, 2017

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by Rebecca Vieyra and Caroline Hall

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• Download Glowstick_RVieyra-FinalEdited_CHall2017April.docx - 1226kb Word Document

Released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license.

Published February 15, 2017
Last Modified June 2, 2017

This file has previous versions.