#I wouldn't blame anyone else for not understanding why artificial light wouldn't work well

[the-bineapple]

🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️OBVIOUSLY you're not going to be able to make a decent rainbow with an LED flashlight - it doesn't have anywhere near the range of wavelengths that the sunlight has. I KNOW what blackbody radiation is and I KNOW how light works. But apparently I forgot how flashlights work, and because I was so confident in my understanding that I didn't bother to adequately research how to make rainbows with prisms and planned an entire STEM activity to lead today at work that is impossible to do because apparently it needs actual sunlight and it's way too cloudy outside

thank goodness I tested it this morning so that I actually have time to throw together a whole new activity since I have to scrap that one

EDIT so I'm not posting factually incorrect information: you CAN make a rainbow with a flashlight and a prism. It may or may not work depending on the flashlight, and it typically won't have the full range of colors that you can get from sunlight because the light in flashlights has way less variation in wavelengths