Upcoming and current events
We are currently expanding our outreach mission to include more interactive online content and additional joint projects with other student groups. If interested, please email us! ! Recent events include:
Stanford Chapter Encourages 6th-12th grade Optics-Themed Photography With Online Contest
The Stanford Chapter recently hosted our second online photography contest for middle and high school students. The annual competition aims to stimulate interest in optics and science at a critical age, encouraging creative optics-themed photography. This year's contest was incredibly successful, receiving over 50 entries from students as far as Colorado. Submissions included long exposure photography where students captured messages written with flashlights, fisheye images, and artful compositions featuring reflections, lasers, and sunlight.
"We were very excited about the wide range of entries," says Stanford OSA/SPIE Chair of Outreach Bryan Ellis. "We cast a larger net in our advertising this year, to reach out to science as well as art classes through many mailing lists. It was also helpful to encourage local 6th-12th graders and their teachers in-person by handing out flyers at our education outreach events earlier in the year."
The photographs were judged based on artistic and technical merit by a distinguished panel including Stanford faculty members and OSA industry professionals. Category winners received prizes such as large-format prints taken by Nobel Laureate and Stanford Professor Doug Osheroff, a green laser pointer donated by the Stanford Photonics Research Center (SPRC), and pinhole camera kits. The winning student photos are featured here on our website.
Visit our 2006 photo contest page to see last year's winning entries and judge profiles.
Girls Go Tech Career Exploration, Feb. 2008
A group of ~5-10 Stanford students visited the Chabot Space and Science Center in Oakland for a Sunday afternoon of sharing hands-on optics activities with K-3rd graders. The Chabot Center was open exclusively to the Girl Scouts of America for this event. For more info, visit the Girl Scouts Bay Area Events Page, or view photos online!
Click here to see photos from the Girls Go Tech event
Stanford OSA/SPIE YouTube Channel
We are currently adding new outreach content to our Stanford OSA/SPIE YouTube Channel! In the coming weeks, look forward to not only the existing Exploratorium demonstrations and Photonics Pioneers video clips, but also video footage from our Girl Scouts Go Tech event, a collage from Educators' Day 2007, and more! If you are interested in helping with this project, please email us!
Previous Outreach Events
Physics Olympiad Optics Questions, Dec. 2007
Thank you to everyone who submitted questions and answers for the US Physics Olympiad! Stanford was well-represented. The Q&A willl be posted at http://student-osa.stanford.edu after the 2008 Olympiad concludes.
Special thanks to: Paulina Kuo (Applied Physics Dept.), Konstantin Parchevsky (HEPL), Jason Pelc (Applied Physics Dept.), Jeff Pickhardt (Physics Dept.) and Joe Schaar (Electrical Engineering Dept.).
Congratulations to Jason Pelc for winning the prize drawing for a $25 gift certificate to Bytes Cafe!
Trip to San Francisco Exploratorium with UC Berkeley and UC Davis OSA/SPIE, Oct. 2007
A group of ~20 students and post-docs from Stanford, Berkeley, and Davis convened at the San Francisco Exploratorium for lunch and time to explore the science exhibits. We videotaped clips of our student members demonstrating the optics exhibits, including local K-12 students as demonstration helpers. Stanford and Berkeley have created YouTube broadcasting channels to share our educational video clips with a broader audience. This stimulated a new initiative to video record our outreach efforts so teachers can learn about different hands-on ways to enhance their optics curriculum.
Click here to see photos from the Exploratorium trip
Download a printable version of the event flyer here.
EDAY 2007, Sept. 2007
Science Educators' Day (EDAY) 2007 is a annual event held in conjunction with the Frontiers in Optics Conference/ Annual OSA Meeting. This year, Stanford Student OSA/SPIE, Berkeley Student OSA/SPIE, OSA and the OSA Foundation coordinated the event for local pre-college (middle and high school) teachers. For the first time, 8 universities (Stanford, UC Berkeley, Caltech, UC Davis, UC Irvine, UC Santa Cruz, San Jose State, and University of Rochester) had hands-on optics demonstrations as part of EDAY!
Available for download:The EDAY 2007 Program: Descriptions of the Demos and the The EDAY 2007 Demonstration Booth Map.
Click here to see photos of EDAY 2007
Attendees of EDAY were given teacher handbooks filled with lesson plans, instructions for how to recreate many of the demonstrations on a budget, and more. You can download the Full PDF Teacher Handbook Created for EDAY 2007.
EDAY 2007 was recently featured in Optics and Photonics News: Download it here!
Interested in learning more about our educational modules? Check back for a new & improved outreach web section in Winter 2008!
Stanford Community Day, May 2007
Over 15,000 visitors are expected for this year's Stanford Community Day on April 15, 2007. The Stanford Optical Society exhibit in the David Packard Electrical Engineering Breezeway will feature 7 interactive demo stations: Fluorescence: Glowing Colors, Splitting of white light, The Great Polariscope, From Sound to Light, Waveguides - Directing the flow of light, The Incredible Glowing Pickle, and Microscopy - Zooming in to the Nanoworld. Come experience the excitement of light and optics!
Photos of Community Day 2007 are here!
Seminar: Using Optics in K-12 Education, March 2007
Donn Silberman, Fouding Director of the Optics Institute of Southern California (OISC) presented success stories and lessons learned from experiences with several Southern California optics groups, including the UC Irvine Student OSA Chapter. At this seminar, we explored lesson plans and outreach exhibits with the "Optricks Suitcase" used by OISC.Click here to see photos from the seminar
Bio-X Kids' Day, June 2006
Student OSA members set up hands-on demonstrations for Waveguides, Diffraction, and Optical Illusions for one of the first annual "Bio-X Kids' Days" organized with the Clark Center at Stanford.Click here to see photos from Bio-X Kids' Day
Synopsys Science & Technology Championship (Silicon Valley Science/Engineering Fair), April 2006
The Synopsys Science and Technology Championship is the regional science and engineering fair for Silicon Valley that provides its high school grand prize winners with a trip to compete in the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (Intel ISEF). Intel ISEF is the world's largest pre-college science fair, bringing together over 1,400 students from more than 40 nations to compete for scholarships, tuition grants, and internships among a number of awards. Middle school award winners from the Synopsys Championship have the chance to go to the California State Science Fair.This year, OSA Chair of Community Outreach Meredith Lee was invited to give the keynote address at the middle and high school award ceremonies at Paramount's Great America theater in San Jose, CA. In addition to describing her previous experience at Intel ISEF and her research at Stanford's Solid State and Photonics Laboratory, Meredith encouraged the students to get involved in professional societies such as IEEE, SWE, and OSA. The image (left) shows our invitation to high school students to enter our new optics-themed photo contest.
Congratulations to the Synopsys award recipients!
Click here to see photos from the Award Ceremony
JETS Day, March 2006 (images)
Each year more than 100 competition sites, including Stanford University, bring the JETS (Junior Engineering Technical Society) Day Science, Engineering, and Math competition to nearly 14,000 students nationwide. This year, ~200 Northern and Central California students from a number of high schools visited Stanford for this competition on Saturday, March 11, 2006.Stanford OSA volunteers organized a table with a gelatin waveguide interactive display and optical illusions poster to much success for students during the competition breaks. In addition, several student OSA members along with the Stanford Society of Women Engineers had lunch with groups of high school students, answering questions about science careers, research, and college classes.
Thanks to all who volunteered, and look forward to seeing you again next spring!
Click here to see photos from JETS Day
Stanford Community Day, 2005 (images)
Webmaster: Chris Fesenmaier Last modified Monday July 14, 2008