Optics Education: Engaging the Next Generation

Adam P. Wax

Duke University, USA

When I think back to the first time that optics caught my attention, I recall a visitor to my 3^rd grade class. He described himself as a laser chemist and brought with him a He-Ne laser. He set up a few basic experiments and lit up the beam path using chalk from the blackboard eraser. It was a good demonstration, but it didn’t spark my imagination until later that school year, May of 1977 to be precise, when a little-known space movie introduced laser swords. I think I probably would have been hooked on Star Wars even without the classroom laser demo, but it did make me feel a special connection.

John Greivenkamp has had a strong impact on the field of optics, but his devotion to optics education may be his greatest contribution, for which he was recognized with the 2017 SPIE Educator Award. Optics education has the unique opportunity to capture the imagination of future scientists using dazzling effects that few other science fields can offer. The hands-on demonstration should be a staple of the optics educator. Today we have incredible resources available to show optics principles. Laser pointers can put a coherent monochromatic beam in the hands of every student in the class, while modern smart phones can conduct a range of functions, serving as a microscope or generating a hologram. My favorite demo that I would do for my own students’ classes used a compact disc to generate rainbow diffraction patterns, although it’s getting harder and harder to find CDs these days.

As the faculty advisor of DOSC, the Duke Optical Student Chapter (joint Optica/SPIE), I have had the opportunity to help our students develop and deliver new outreach activities for K-12 students. This is an important role for the chapter for two reasons. First, it helps the young professionals in our chapter, typically PhD and master’s students, develop their interest and skills in teaching. The second reason is an even greater motivator, inspiring the next generation of optical scientists and engineers.

While our outreach has been very successful, consisting of traveling to local elementary, middle, and high schools with live optics demos, some of our best events have taken place when we open up our doors to the community. Working with the leadership of the Fitzpatrick Institute for Photonics at Duke (Prof. Tuan Vo Dinh, Director; August Burns, Manager), we have hosted several events at our center. This provides a very exciting opportunity for aspiring scientists to gain hands-on experience with optics, since many have never had the chance to see a real research lab. Our open houses for the International Year of Light and Introduce a Girl to Photonics were very well attended and may have influenced many young scientists to follow a career in optics. Although our most recently planned event, the Photonics Field Day was sidelined due to the pandemic, we hope that we will be able to open our doors again soon.

Photo credit: August Burns.