I spent my entire Saturday helping out at Explore UT as part of a Biomedical Optics Graduate Organization (BOGO) outreach event. We held three forty-minute-long sessions with about thirty kids (8-11 years old) and taught them about optics and the properties of light. Thanks to some incredible funding from our backing organizations (OSA and SPIE), we were able to provide the kids with numerous hands-on, take-home demos including polarizers, diffraction gratings, UV color-changing beads, and a telescope. It was great interacting with kids concerning topics that are much more tangible than molecule engineering, which has always been a downside to my previous research experiences. There’s just something incredibly satisfying about seeing their eyes light up when they play around with these simple experiments. I think this one picture summarizes everything quite nicely.
