This fall, Karen Thimmesch and I are working with a group of 6th graders at Museum Magnet School (St. Paul, MN) to make kinetic light art, using materials that make interesting shadows and reflections, lights, screens, and crickets and motors to make these lights and objects move. Days 1 and 2: Experimentation We spent about an hour each day playing with lights (mini Maglights, with the top taken off), screens (pieces of vellum, hung under the tables), and materials (netting, sparkly fabric, feathers, mylar...) to explore the images we could get.

Okay next - adding the light... So these are quite beautiful... Its also very interesting that some researchers are focused in recreating caustics in the field of computer graphics. Henrik Wann Jensen is an associate professor at the University of California at San Diego, where he is working in the computer graphics lab..

This worked so well - and I think it would work on an even larger scale. Mine was about 30" high by 15" wide. Here's some pix: Finger paint on plexi glass -- there's aluminum foil along the edges of the plexi with resistance sensors clipped to each side -- paint to change the resistance. Here's a closer view that shows how it is set up.