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Simple creative projects from an optics teaching laboratory

The core educational program of the Stony Brook Laser Teaching Center is learning through the collaborative development of individualized projects. Many of these projects, especially with students new to research, are simple explorations or demonstrations of everyday devices or phenomena related to light, optics, or sound that have some creative component. Often the topic is suggested by something the student is just curious about or ‘invents,’ or by a chance observation or news article. This paper will describe a number of these ‘simple, creative’ projects, and relate the discovery process by which each came about and the results obtained.