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Published on Leave a comment on Ramsgate outreach activity – Kent University. March 2022

Kent and Discovery Planet open innovative community space in Ramsgate

On 10 March, the innovative and welcoming community space was opened, where regular interactive workshops delivered by research scientists from Kent will take place over the coming years. The space opening was timed to coincide with British Science Week 2022 (11-20 March), a ten-day celebration of science, technology, engineering and maths.

The hands-on workshops for school children and members of the community launched with a free three-day event called Light Fantastic, which explores the amazing properties of light. The Light Fantastic sessions were delivered by Kent’s Applied Optics Group (Dr Adrian Bradu, Dr. George Dobre, Dr. Mike Hughes, Dr. Manuel Marques, NETLAS PhD Students) Alejandro Martinez Jimenez and Gopika Venugopal and touched on the fact that light science has many medical applications, such as enabling an examination of people’s eyes. There were 500 participants over the three days, including 242 students between the ages of 8-14 from nine schools and over 100 members of the public.

Photo credit: Pete Bateson
Photo credit: Pete Bateson
Photo credit: Pete Bateson. In the photo Manuel Marques previous President of the Kent Optics Chapter

Alejandro Martinez, President of Optica Chapter at Kent said:

"Building a periscope and later enjoying a light maze using mirrors and beam splitters, this activity allows the children to have some fun and learn science! In my opinion I think this kind of outreach events are important during our PhD. At first, we need to help with the organization and design the event. This gives us a perspective in how we should organize our events, where to make publicity and who to contact. Once the event is ongoing we must talk in a non-technical environment, speak in-person to a general audience about our research, which is always a step more to express ourselves. All these skills together are quite valuable for the PhD students and also is important keep connection with the society”

At the beginning of October 2015 two postgraduate students from the University of Kent OSA Student Chapter (Yong Hu & Mike Everson) embarked on a weeklong trip to Besançon, France to give a collection of talks to school students. The trip, organised by Carole Hémard from the British Council, was an effort to introduce young ...continue reading "Science in Schools – outreach activity in Besançon, France"
Published on Leave a comment on Science in Schools – outreach activity in Besançon, France

At the beginning of October 2015 two postgraduate students from the University of Kent OSA Student Chapter (Yong Hu & Mike Everson) embarked on a weeklong trip to Besançon, France to give a collection of talks to school students.

The trip, organised by Carole Hémard from the British Council, was an effort to introduce young pupils (14-20yrs) to the potential eventuality of working with foreign speaking collaborators as well as taking a break from their usual routine by giving them the chance to meet with professionals and have some fun with science.

Besancon 2015

The researchers visited a number of schools in the surrounding areas including Montbéliard, Belfort and Morez where they discovered that regular adjustments to their talks were necessary to suit the abilities of the pupils as well as the varying time frames available at different venues.

The talks focused on the properties of light and its applications in fibre optics, with the use of an interactive demonstration, and spectroscopy, where the pupils made their own spectroscope in a workshop and used them to deduce the elements in four different atomic emission gas tubes. The introduction also gave the pupils some background details about the speakers and how they came to be university postgraduate students, the idea being to show that they can elevate themselves to any position they desire and also to inspire and encourage the pursuit of a career in science.

No trip abroad could possibly take place without a little sight seeing and so the postgraduates were suitably treated to a variety of science museums and expositions, some of which were centred on optics and photonics. Plus they attended the ‘fête de la Science’ in Besançon and met with the director of the International Year of Light (IYL) initiative, Professor John Dudley, as well as many other scientists and professionals in the same subject areas.

Overall the trip was a huge success, justifiable by the large amount of positive feedback returned from the pupils who attended as well as the teachers, inspectors, lab assistants and other onlookers. Now that the right connections have been established with academics through the British Council, the University of Kent’s OSA Student Chapter has the exciting potential to undergo similar outreach activities in the future.

On Saturday, March 14th, several members of the Applied Optics Group and of the OSA student chapter took on the challenge of organising and hosting an outreach event with the support of the School of Physical Sciences at the local city museum, the Beaney House of Art and Knowledge. Titled "Light up your life - ...continue reading "Outreach event at the Beaney museum"
Published on Leave a comment on Outreach event at the Beaney museum

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Our BLOX demonstration kit in action!

On Saturday, March 14th, several members of the Applied Optics Group and of the OSA student chapter took on the challenge of organising and hosting an outreach event with the support of the School of Physical Sciences at the local city museum, the Beaney House of Art and Knowledge.

Titled "Light up your life - Day of Discovery", this event focused on raising awareness of the importance of Optics and Photonics among the general public, especially since this year has been proclaimed by the United Nations as the International Year of Light (IYL). We had about 100-200 people attending throughout the day, mostly families with children, which made it that more challenging as the way the content was presented had to be changed on-the-fly!

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Models of some of the "samples" we image at our Biomedical Imaging lab.

The event couldn't have gone forward without the organisation (and recruiting) from our School's outreach officer, Dr Vicky Mason, to whom we are grateful. She also provided an additional interactive module in the form of a thermal imaging camera (which yielded some interesting thermal "selfies" such as the one below).

A thermal photo of our current chapter president, Manuel Marques. (bluer regions mean lower surface temperatures).
A thermal photo of our current chapter president, Manuel Marques. (bluer regions mean lower surface temperatures).

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Some outreach posters were also exhibited, along with a slideshow depicting photos of our fellow researchers working in the lab (in the picture we have Yong aligning his Ti-Sapphire laser!).

Finally, our thanks to all of our colleagues who kindly volunteered to be there on a Saturday: Prof Adrian Podoleanu, Dr Adrian Bradu, Dr Sylvain Rivet, Christopher Costa, Catherine Chin, Manuel Marques, Michaël Maria and Radu Stancu.