On May 24th 2019, Shereen Hamdy the chair of the PhoSoc Outreach Committee, presented at the ETOP 2019 conference (Education and Training in Optics & Photonics) in Quebec, Canada! Her paper discussed the outreach activities that the Phosoc Outreach Committee has developed to show the exciting principles of photonics while developing good practices for scientific inquiry and research.
Light-based educational outreach activities for pre-university students
Author(s): Shereen W. Hamdy, Takako Hirokawa, Philip Chan, Warren Jin, Victoria Rosborough, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara (United States); Eric Stanton, National Institute of Standards and Technology (United States); Andrew M. Netherton, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara (United States); Marilyn Garza, Santa Barbara Junior High School (United States); Wendy Ibsen, Demis D. John, John E. Bowers, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara (United States)
We developed three light-based educational outreach activities for pre-university students, emphasizing hands-on components for core learning. These activities leverage concepts from integrated optics and solid-state lighting, centering on (1) building a free-space optical link, (2) subtractive and additive color mixing, and (3) guiding light using gelatin "waveguides". We garner considerable excitement in students when activities culminate in an open-ended challenge. Activity leaders emphasize important research practices such as learning from the success of others' experiments, making and testing informed hypotheses, persistence in understanding and solving problems, and the desire to improve upon even a working solution.