[mncharity]

OT question: Is it possible to use a wedge-shaped slit (uneven width) to increase the dynamic range of a slit-grating-camera phone spectrograph?

Backstory: I've repeatedly encountered deep confusion about color, even among first-tier physical-sciences graduate students. Yet color is widely taught K-2. Apparently without great success. So what might a rewrite, a modern learning progression for color, look like? Perhaps one based on spectra, a modern colorspace, and building on current understanding of color perception? Tablets are used in K - "find and take a picture of a circle". So how about using them for color? There's middle-school work with color "arithmetic" (an <R, G, B> binary triple with addition(light) and subtraction(filter)). And phone spectrographs are a thing. Thermal IR inspection cameras suggest having a context image aids understandability, and phones now have multiple cameras, so might one do a more accessible sample-with-context spectroscope app? With the light path folded flat, not sticking out? And a high dynamic range to permit sampling objects under ambient illumination? Might one craft a spectra-based introduction to color? For K?

[jiggunjer]

Why. All models are flawed, some are useful. Kids learn mixing paints, that's useful for arts and crafts. Students learn more advanced models depending on their needs.

[mncharity]

> Why. All models are flawed, some are useful. Kids learn mixing paints, that's useful for arts and crafts. Students learn more advanced models depending on their needs.

:) Partly-in-jest paraphrase: Most all models used in science education are needlessly ghastly flawed, leaving students and their teachers steeped in misconceptions. Some are useful - for important exams, or for collaborating with teachers in pretending topics are understood, though vanishingly few provide transferable or operational understanding, let alone integrated or interdisciplinary or rough-quantitative understanding. Students develop less dysfunctional understanding depending on their needs, which can be surprisingly limited. For examples, students empirically don't need to know the color of the Sun to be first-tier astronomy graduate students, nor the order-of-magnitude size of cells to be first-tier medical graduate students, so teaching the wrong color for the Sun, starting in K and continuing into undergrad intro astronomy, and teaching size/scale unsuccessfully from middle-school through undergrad, are in some sense not failing to meet student needs.

Shrug, ok. Also, it's unclear society needs, wants, or would appreciate, or even tolerate, students making sense of the physical world.

But... it can be fun, to at least discuss and explore, how we might go about it, were that an objective to be intensively pursued. No?

[jiggunjer]

There are many intentional omissions because people can't afford to study too many years on a curriculum. If you're interested in exploring this issue, perhaps consider what priorities an education ministry would have. For most, knowledge is a means to an end, not an end unto itself.