Light-based educational outreach activities for pre-university students

We have developed three light-based educational outreach activities targeted towards pre-university students, emphasizing experiential hands-on components for core learning via challenges the students must complete. These activities leverage photonics concepts from two active research areas at the Univ. of California Santa Barbara: integrated optics and solid-state lighting. The activities center on (1) building a free-space optical link, (2) subtractive and additive color mixing, and (3) guiding light using gelatin “waveguides”. These activities are self-contained that is, the necessary background and intuition are introduced and built, respectively, before culminating in the main demonstration. The color-mixing and gelatin waveguide activities were designed for middle school students (ages 10-13) and their families, while the free-space optical link activity was designed for high school students (ages 14-18). Graduate students, not necessarily in photonics or optics, typically lead these activities for groups of 20-30 students after an initial training. We have found that we are able to garner considerable excitement from students when activities culminate in a challenge, especially if it has a competitive nature. This allows leaders to emphasize important practices in scientific research, such as: using the success of others’ experiments to one’s benefit, making informed hypotheses and testing them, persistence in understanding and solving a problem, and finally, the desire to improve upon a working solution.