Color Play

“I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way – things I had no words for.” —Georgia O'Keeffe

On Exhibit: May-August 2009

Color Play invites adults and children to play with colors through whole-body experiences, hands-on interactives and opportunities for fantasy play.

Things to Do: 
  • Inside the Color Play House, three artistically painted and specially lit rooms show off color in amazing ways.
  • Through Color Windows, parents and caregivers outside turn green, yellow, red, and blue.
  • Two different lamps light the Yellow Light Room. The changing light dramatically transforms the paintings on the wall and other colors of the room.
  • It may look easy to read aloud the names of colors, but what makes the Stroop Test fun is that they’re printed in the wrong colors! The brain sees the colors, not the words, and gets easily tripped up.
  • Turn the crank in the Ultraviolet Light Room to make an ultraviolet spotlight sweep the room, uncovering many surprises.
  • In the Rainbow Room, a chandelier rotates, making moving rainbow reflections on the ceiling, which is covered with holographic refraction material.
  • The Rainbow Room is also a place to enjoy a variety of books about color.
  • At the Neon Swirl, an interactive sculpture that displays many of the bright colors used by neon sign makers, children can turn a crank that makes the tubes flash on and off in sequence.
  • Bright colors appear like magic when kids hold clear plastic objects between the two polarized filters in the Polarized Window.
  • When kids lift a bubble frame to make the Soap Bubble Window, the colors in the soap film stand out against a solid black background.
  • Color Dance invites more active play, as kids dance to the rhythms of the moving lights.
  • A Prism’s Rainbow introduces a basic science concept: white light is made of colors. Kids move a prism into the path of light from a slit lamp, making a rainbow. When they turn a crank that bends a plastic mirror, the rainbow recombines back to white light.
  • TV Colors is a television set with a large magnifier in the middle of the screen that lets people see the individual pixels of red, green and blue.
  • Color Creations shows how transparent colored plastic pieces can combine to create new colors.
  • Picture Printing shows how colored pictures are made, by rolling out the cyan, magenta, yellow and black transparencies and watching a full-color picture appear!
  • Pigment Palette, created by the artist Ahlin, is an artistically done display showing many facets of Color in painting.
  • Spin the Color Spinners to create a variety of color effects.
  • Kids make a Color Storm when they hand crank the pedals of an upside down bicycle.
  • The Big Kaleidoscope is big enough that a whole family or a group of kids can see the colorful patterns mix and change when one kid turns the crank. Go to the other end and your face can be in the Kaleidoscope, too.
  • Afterimages plays with the eye-brain connection. Stare at a yellow, blue and black image of the American flag and the afterimage of the familiar red, white and blue will appear.

Color Play was developed by Clifford Wagner Science Interactives