who’s the person who cheered physics
excellent when we look up into the night
sky into a starry night sky we can see a
billion points of brightness a billion
stars emitting energy in all directions
and we’re lucky enough that some of that
energy comes towards us on earth it
travels across the vastness of space
through our atmosphere down to us on
earth as the viewer it hits the surface
of our lens on our eye refracts through
it onto our retina and for the first
time in millions and millions of years
it transforms into a new kind of energy
it transforms from light energy into
electrical energy and that electrical
energy is then interpreted by your brain
as vision as what you see and the
misstate in this case in context the
Stars
you have to realize how long it took to
get here how long was that journey and
in the end it ended up in you it’s an
honor unless of course you’re Demi Demi
is an amazing individual a wonderful
young lady Demi is a year H student at
the school I work out and Demi has a
real barrier to her learning because
she’s the entirely blind she was born
visually impaired and at the age of
seven doctors discovered benign tumors
behind her good eye and they had to
remove the tumors and unfortunately they
also had to remove the eye and the year
later and I’ve got to get this right
they discovered a retinoblastoma a
cancer of the optic nerve in her other
eye and they removed that too
so by the age of a day me can’t see
anything but despite this despite this
she’s a smiler she’s a smiler amazing
about a year ago we had a super learning
day our school and what happens in a
super learning day is effectively
teachers can kind of go off piste and we
can kind of teach things that were
actually interested in and this super
learning day because of the way the
curriculum changed I won’t mention the
awarded body but they removed space for
some bizarre reason and that’s one of
the most exciting things to teach year
eights space um so we decided that our
department would teach everything to do
space and I decided to teach
astronomical spectroscopy I said it yes
correctly okay which is basically the
study of light or particularly starlight
now I had the lesson pretty much sorted
within five minutes go something like
this all the kids come in you get them
to make some tactile crafty things they
make little boxes they stick a DVD or a
CD inside it and that’s a spectroscope
and they go around the room and there’s
different bulbs a low energy light bulb
a neon bulb a tungsten bulb and they
look for the spectroscope and inside the
spectroscope they can see different
patterns of life and they can infer what
light comes from what particular type of
pattern comes from one particular type
of light and that’s great until I found
out that I had Deming because it doesn’t
work with Demi she can’t see
so I had to throw the whole thing out of
the window the question is this how can
you convey a starry night to a blind
person
you have to use creativity you have to
think about how you could do that what
you’re about to hear is a starry night
played as an audio file the picture
behind me behind the text is actually
the file that it comes from is generated
and what you’ll hear is you’ll hear
different beeps and Boop’s noises now
the volume of the beeps and Boop’s is
dependent upon the magnitude or the
brightness
of the star and the pitch or the tone is
dependent upon the color within that
start blue white red so I think it
should paint though okay I forgot the
end because it kind of builds up in the
middle where the bright bit is and it
builds up again that little one at the
top right corner that one there at the
end now what happened there a vertical
bar played across the screen and it
played it now this picture I had to
alter if I tried to play this picture
now there was so much information in it
that it just comes across as static too
much information but it gives you an
idea of how much information is in the
picture and obviously Demi would never
be able to see that picture so what I
did was this I thought I need to be able
to communicate astronomical spectroscopy
to Deming here is a spectrum of color a
rainbow of color I’m going from red
through to blue from low frequency low
energy to high frequency high energy we
can see these if we look for a prism
people will recognize this picture as
the front cover all the inspiration
behind the 1973 album which I’ve got in
my house a Dark Side of the Moon by Pink
Floyd we can do the same thing with
starlight but instead of using a prism
we use the thing called a diffraction
grating now a diffraction grating does
the same thing as a prism splits the
light into colors maybe this big but a
diffraction grating splits it into a
much wider area and it allows us to see
something quite interesting phenomena
called Fraunhofer lines and Fraunhofer
lines are effectively dark lines within
the spectrum of light that never got
away from that star it never escaped it
got caught up in the chemistry of that
star so what happens you can use these
fingerprints or barcodes to determine
what star it came from every star is
unique but more importantly every
element every chemical has a unique
thing
and this is where I started so what I’m
going to show you now is the element of
hydrogen here’s hydrogen all I’ve done
is taken out the parts where the dark
wines were and this element of hydrogen
is what they call a spectrograph there’s
some more
here’s helium it’s very similar and it
makes sense because in the periodic
table hydrogen helium you’re quite close
together that makes sense is a visual
thing there next one
mercury very different and again neon
and then finally sodium okay so now you
can understand the problem I face how do
you communicate the nuances of this to a
blind child and this is what I did
here’s a first clue a spectrograph of
hydrogen and the reveal is the next
slide a piano keyboard what you do is
you play the piano and you line up
effectively each Fraunhofer line with
each key on thirty-one notes two and a
bit octaves 31 tones and you can play
the element as a musical chord with all
the nuances with all the beat
frequencies with all the sonic
interactions and Tombaugh that come with
that a person can then identify it just
by audio alone I’d included Denney I’d
level the playing field
everyone had to learn it the same way so
what I’m going to do now or the lovely
people that like are going to do is
you’re now going to listen to the sound
it’s spooky
okay before we go to helium and play
helium remember they’re close together
helium please
it’s still quite low but it makes sense
they’ve got a similar timbre to them
that’s something totally different
that one was easier and then finally
and they loved that one because that was
like the aliens coming down to earth
this okay the subtext to my talk was to
design and deliver a creative content to
include engage and inspire and it did I
had the whole class eating out of my
hand
they were ping it up they thoroughly
enjoyed themselves
it just it was amazing creativity
enables individuals to leap over
barriers in their personal learning
journeys and creativity is I would argue
always is the most important tool in a
teacher or anybody’s talk it you can
smash through doors to learning you can
smash through doors and enable learning
to happen in against traditional ways of
learning there’s peer lis visual science
and spectroscopy is then opened up to
someone who can see Demi learn that
light from stars contains secret codes
that hinted the chemistry at that staff
millions and millions and millions of
miles away
Demi now knows this Denney experienced
[Applause] [Music]
excellent when we look up into the night
sky into a starry night sky we can see a
billion points of brightness a billion
stars emitting energy in all directions
and we’re lucky enough that some of that
energy comes towards us on earth it
travels across the vastness of space
through our atmosphere down to us on
earth as the viewer it hits the surface
of our lens on our eye refracts through
it onto our retina and for the first
time in millions and millions of years
it transforms into a new kind of energy
it transforms from light energy into
electrical energy and that electrical
energy is then interpreted by your brain
as vision as what you see and the
misstate in this case in context the
Stars
you have to realize how long it took to
get here how long was that journey and
in the end it ended up in you it’s an
honor unless of course you’re Demi Demi
is an amazing individual a wonderful
young lady Demi is a year H student at
the school I work out and Demi has a
real barrier to her learning because
she’s the entirely blind she was born
visually impaired and at the age of
seven doctors discovered benign tumors
behind her good eye and they had to
remove the tumors and unfortunately they
also had to remove the eye and the year
later and I’ve got to get this right
they discovered a retinoblastoma a
cancer of the optic nerve in her other
eye and they removed that too
so by the age of a day me can’t see
anything but despite this despite this
she’s a smiler she’s a smiler amazing
about a year ago we had a super learning
day our school and what happens in a
super learning day is effectively
teachers can kind of go off piste and we
can kind of teach things that were
actually interested in and this super
learning day because of the way the
curriculum changed I won’t mention the
awarded body but they removed space for
some bizarre reason and that’s one of
the most exciting things to teach year
eights space um so we decided that our
department would teach everything to do
space and I decided to teach
astronomical spectroscopy I said it yes
correctly okay which is basically the
study of light or particularly starlight
now I had the lesson pretty much sorted
within five minutes go something like
this all the kids come in you get them
to make some tactile crafty things they
make little boxes they stick a DVD or a
CD inside it and that’s a spectroscope
and they go around the room and there’s
different bulbs a low energy light bulb
a neon bulb a tungsten bulb and they
look for the spectroscope and inside the
spectroscope they can see different
patterns of life and they can infer what
light comes from what particular type of
pattern comes from one particular type
of light and that’s great until I found
out that I had Deming because it doesn’t
work with Demi she can’t see
so I had to throw the whole thing out of
the window the question is this how can
you convey a starry night to a blind
person
you have to use creativity you have to
think about how you could do that what
you’re about to hear is a starry night
played as an audio file the picture
behind me behind the text is actually
the file that it comes from is generated
and what you’ll hear is you’ll hear
different beeps and Boop’s noises now
the volume of the beeps and Boop’s is
dependent upon the magnitude or the
brightness
of the star and the pitch or the tone is
dependent upon the color within that
start blue white red so I think it
should paint though okay I forgot the
end because it kind of builds up in the
middle where the bright bit is and it
builds up again that little one at the
top right corner that one there at the
end now what happened there a vertical
bar played across the screen and it
played it now this picture I had to
alter if I tried to play this picture
now there was so much information in it
that it just comes across as static too
much information but it gives you an
idea of how much information is in the
picture and obviously Demi would never
be able to see that picture so what I
did was this I thought I need to be able
to communicate astronomical spectroscopy
to Deming here is a spectrum of color a
rainbow of color I’m going from red
through to blue from low frequency low
energy to high frequency high energy we
can see these if we look for a prism
people will recognize this picture as
the front cover all the inspiration
behind the 1973 album which I’ve got in
my house a Dark Side of the Moon by Pink
Floyd we can do the same thing with
starlight but instead of using a prism
we use the thing called a diffraction
grating now a diffraction grating does
the same thing as a prism splits the
light into colors maybe this big but a
diffraction grating splits it into a
much wider area and it allows us to see
something quite interesting phenomena
called Fraunhofer lines and Fraunhofer
lines are effectively dark lines within
the spectrum of light that never got
away from that star it never escaped it
got caught up in the chemistry of that
star so what happens you can use these
fingerprints or barcodes to determine
what star it came from every star is
unique but more importantly every
element every chemical has a unique
thing
and this is where I started so what I’m
going to show you now is the element of
hydrogen here’s hydrogen all I’ve done
is taken out the parts where the dark
wines were and this element of hydrogen
is what they call a spectrograph there’s
some more
here’s helium it’s very similar and it
makes sense because in the periodic
table hydrogen helium you’re quite close
together that makes sense is a visual
thing there next one
mercury very different and again neon
and then finally sodium okay so now you
can understand the problem I face how do
you communicate the nuances of this to a
blind child and this is what I did
here’s a first clue a spectrograph of
hydrogen and the reveal is the next
slide a piano keyboard what you do is
you play the piano and you line up
effectively each Fraunhofer line with
each key on thirty-one notes two and a
bit octaves 31 tones and you can play
the element as a musical chord with all
the nuances with all the beat
frequencies with all the sonic
interactions and Tombaugh that come with
that a person can then identify it just
by audio alone I’d included Denney I’d
level the playing field
everyone had to learn it the same way so
what I’m going to do now or the lovely
people that like are going to do is
you’re now going to listen to the sound
it’s spooky
okay before we go to helium and play
helium remember they’re close together
helium please
it’s still quite low but it makes sense
they’ve got a similar timbre to them
that’s something totally different
that one was easier and then finally
and they loved that one because that was
like the aliens coming down to earth
this okay the subtext to my talk was to
design and deliver a creative content to
include engage and inspire and it did I
had the whole class eating out of my
hand
they were ping it up they thoroughly
enjoyed themselves
it just it was amazing creativity
enables individuals to leap over
barriers in their personal learning
journeys and creativity is I would argue
always is the most important tool in a
teacher or anybody’s talk it you can
smash through doors to learning you can
smash through doors and enable learning
to happen in against traditional ways of
learning there’s peer lis visual science
and spectroscopy is then opened up to
someone who can see Demi learn that
light from stars contains secret codes
that hinted the chemistry at that staff
millions and millions and millions of
miles away
Demi now knows this Denney experienced
[Applause] [Music]
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