Week of November 8, 2009

During the 2 lessons this week; we visited these 3 websites and looked at different illusions. We also did 2 similar challenges.
The three websites were the following:

www.kids.nieh.nih.gov/illusion/illusions.htm
www.sciencebob.com/experiments/illusion.html
www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/body/interactives/senseschallenge

The first senses challenge that I did was out of 10; and I got an 8. One of the questions I got wrong had to do with combinations of taste where I guessed the answer. Apparently pineapple and soy sauce taste good together. The other question I got wrong had to do with the most sensitive part of our body; and I remembered studying in grade 7 that it was fingers but I thought it was supposed to be a trick question, so I said it was taste. The second challenge that I did was out of 20; and I got a 15. One of the illusions was particularly interesting as two creatures appeared to be the same time but one was significantly bigger. We also looked at various optical illusions where some things appeared to be moving although they weren’t moving. In some of the optical illusions, the brain is tricked and makes things appear to move or adds certain elements to images that aren’t actually there. We rely on our sight and use it more than our other senses and sometimes it deceives us like with illusions where we see shapes move although they aren’t moving. This teaches us that things are not always as they appear.

During the first lesson this week we looked at an illusion that was quite interesting; there were two images/illusions of women and they both looked scary/angry when we looked at them closely, but when we looked at them at a further distance the scarier/angrier one appeared not to have an expression on her face while the other one looked angrier.