Summer of Science: Optical Illusions

Summer of Science

This week’s Summer of Science experiment is all about playing tricks on our eyes.  So after spending too much time Googling and trying different optical illusions the kids and I tried to replicate one on our own, the Cafe Wall illusion exact.  If you squint your eyes it totally works! 

We used a regular piece of lined paper as a guide and then added little tabs like this all the way across the page.

Once you are done it should look like this. 

Yes, we messed up the first couple of rows but it was still fun trying to recreate this illusion that depends on the shift from light to dark to create the impression that the lines aren’t parallel. 

Here’s a little homework for you….how many different types of optical illusions are there?