Abstract

The education system of developing countries like India lack infrastructure for teaching science through demonstrations and experiments. The teaching of optics is generally based on factual data given in text books. Students are forced to believe natural phenomena without actually getting convinced themselves through observations. This imparts a big flaw in the way students understand and experience science. The International School of Photonics SPIE (International Society for Optical Engineering) Student chapter, in Cochin University of Science and Technology (CUSAT) in India comes up with their outreach activities, which is mainly aimed at giving hands on experience for school students with Optics. The pedagogy is completely in tune with the syllabus of Indian schools. This activity is being conducted by the students who are studying Photonics in University level. This gives the students a teaching experience as well. The outreach activity has been designed in two modes – Optics Fair & Optics to School.

Optics Fair is a massive outreach program which has being conducted yearly since 2006. The two day event attracts more than 1500 school students as well as general public every year. The event is divided into three sections;-Primary, Secondary & Higher Secondary and the experiments are carefully chosen that the students will be able to appreciate them with their prior knowledge in optics. The basic idea put forward is “See and Believe”. In three years this event has become very popular attracting more and more students each year.

Optics to School is another mode of the outreach activity where the volunteers go to schools for a one day session where optics experiments are demonstrated to students in interesting and exciting way. The idea is to reach students in the schools in rural areas who are not able to take part in the Optics Fair due to economic constraints for transportation. This activity also has been running for past 3 years successfully.

The response received for these outreach activities is overwhelming. Program is successful in its mission to invoke curiosity and interest in students towards optics. Also within the given time constraint the program is able to give an insight of subject to students.

© 2009 Optical Society of America