EISCO Deluxe Optics Kit - Mirrored Light/Ray Box & 29 Optical Components - Includes Manual with 18 Activities

This is a very nice starter kit for introducing young students to geometric optics, qualitatively as well as quantitatively. Diaphragms in front of the lightbox allow selecting one, two, or three beams to be used in conjunction with lenses, prisms, and rectangular bars. On the back side, optical filters and mirrors can be used to study the additive mixing of colors, the reflection of colored light from differently colored slides, etc. The instruction manual is well done and provides guidance to a number of experiments. Altogether a very useful lab for the basics.

As photos. Booklet is damaged.

Items was missing

This is a nice set for the sub 70 price with a few caveats.Pros:Nice assortment of lenses, and they are opaque enough that the students can see the light rays traveling through the lens as well as entering and exiting.Light color mixing is acceptable, enough for students to see the general idea.Ray portion of box works well.Comes with a nice assortment of colored slides.Cost/teaching value is high. My students not only could see what was happening in the lenses but also experimented with different combinations of the lenses.Cons:Using the specified 2amp 12 volt power one of the colored filters warped after about an hour of use.The two curved mirrors are not high quality, it was more difficult for student to see the focal point on these than on an older set I have.The leads get in the way as they plug in the top.Note:It would be nice if this came with some worksheets, even in pdf form. I ended up tracing around the lenses to make sheets the students could use to report results and to investigate nearsighted/farsighted issues. I also made some worksheets with “blank” spots for lenses to go and the rays traced so they had to figure out which lenses to use to get the light to bend in that manner.I gave them a pretest after they had read about ray tracing and then again after the lab. The lab made a difference in comprehension.

This was on sale for half price, and I wish I had paid only half or a third of that. The parts are reasonable well made, but the box and instructions are kind of shabby. The light box, which is supposed to be the centerpiece of learning about lenses and mirrors, is more bulky and clumsy than it ought to be. There is this huge instruction booklet, but it takes two pages to say what can be said in a quarter page, better.Why are all "learning" sets so cheaply made and so expensive? Is it that the companies look down on the parent and have no regard for children? And how smart the kids are? The habit seems to be "Oh, this can be used for learning - quadruple the price, and use the cheapest components and materials".I can tell that "someone" put a bit of effort into trying to teach optics to kids, but I think it got messed up by marketing. Or maybe every supplier wants top dollar, regardless of who or what it is for.About all I can do is make my own light source and try to use these 2D lenses and parts. Write my own instructions, and hope that is good enough. And give them online tools to show them how to design new things, and verify what they are seeing and measuring against what has already been found by previous generations.Isn't there a good supplier of educational materials?If Amazon would build community sites, not just sales pages with no support or interaction, maybe people could work together. There are about 2 Billion kids from 4 to 21 in the world now. And most all of them will be shown a bit about lenses, cameras, telescopes, microscopes, lasers and things that scan, record, measure and shape things. In our lives there are lots of things that use basic optics, but it is hidden inside a black box.Maybe there is a way to show the common methods used to make things. Teach that, and perhaps the world will not seem so confusing and wasteful.

If you have a car battery, golf cart battery, or similar, you're ready to go. In my case, I'm a ham radio operator and have a 12 volt power supply on my desk. So I was literally operational in seconds.There's lots of components and the guide is very easy to follow, with lots of interesting experiments.

I opened the box, and I am missing two of the prisms for this set. Everything else seems to be in good condition.

I bought this kit to help demonstrate different properties and behaviors of light. It works very well on the whole. A lot is included for the price. The prisms are cheap but they do demonstrate refraction and total internal reflection well. They do not make terribly bright rainbows but good quality glass prisms are better for that anyway. Be aware that you will need a 12 volt power supply (such as two 6 volt batteries) which is not included with this kit. They do include plug in leads for ease of attaching to whatever power supply you have though. The slit cards work well as do the mirrors on either side. I understand there is a heat tolerance issue with the fragile color frames but they explain that in the activity book - which is great for using as an accompanying lab with students (answers included).