Magnifying Glass Camera – Lab Activity

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Disclaimer: This activity is a customized version of the experiment found in the textbook with permission from Wiley

Learning Goals:

Students will be able to:

  1. Improvise and build small physics experiment from household items
  2. Observe and describe physical phenomena
  3. Explain how images are formed with a converging lens.
  4. Relate everyday life events with physical theories

Experiment:

There are many household devices that manipulate light, and one of the most familiar is a magnifying glass. A magnifying glass bends light rays toward one another as they pass through it. In this chapter, we’ll see how a simple converging lens of this sort can magnify an object or cast its image onto a light-sensitive surface. For the moment, we’ll use it to cast the image of a window onto a wall.

Take a magnifying glass to a room with a bright window and turn off the lights. Hold the magnifying glass near the wall opposite the window and move the glass toward or away from the wall until you see a window-shaped pattern of light appear on the wall. Once that pattern is visible, carefully adjust the magnifying glass’s orientation and distance from the wall to obtain the sharpest image of the window. You’ll probably also see images of objects outside that window, but you’ll have to move the magnifying glass to sharpen those images.

  1. Which way did you move the glass to get it to focus, and why can’t all the images be sharp at the same time?
  2. You can project images of other brightly illuminated objects on a sheet of white paper. What features of the lens determine the sizes of those images?
  3. What determines their orientations?
  4. Block part of the lens, and notice how it affects the images.
  5. Try to form images of objects at different distances from you. Do they all form images simultaneously, or do you have to adjust the lens somehow to bring each image into sharp focus?
  6. If you had a larger magnifying glass, how would this change what you see?

Concluding Everyday Life Task:

  • Name two examples from your personal daily life where you see a phenomenon like this. Please try not to give standard examples as given in the textbook but make it a personal challenge to discover new examples in your daily life!

Directions:

  1. Carefully build the experimental setup as instructed
  2. Perform the experiment by following the given instructions
  3. Record your observations and conclusions in a brief written report by answering the given questions
  4. Include pictures or a short video of your experiment into your report in order to support your findings
  5. Submit the report including photos or videos before the deadline