Teaching coloured perception to Thai students by inquiry

Abstract

Coloured light and colour perception are the scientific phenomena close to every one. However, results from the preliminary work using conceptual test showed that the students taught with traditional teaching have a lot of misconceptions about coloured light and colour perception. This conceptual test are composed of six open-ended questions used to probe the students’ understanding of primary coloured lights and their combination, colour perception under the white light or others coloured light conditions and the phenomenon named “after image”. This result implies that traditional teaching can not make the students to understand in these topics, clearly. Therefore we construct the coloured light mixing box with removable light emitted diode (LED) sockets and use the white, orange, purple, red, green and blue LEDs as the light sources. Then we introduced this instrument into an interactive classroom with hands-on activities. As a result, students can learn and gain correct understanding of the phenomena of coloured light by themselves.