June 2001
Annual Educational Outreach Meeting

"LASE: Laser Applications in Science Education"
A laser demonstration workshop for science educators

The Optical Society of San Diego and this evening's host, Sean Re, are pleased to present a workshop by Prof. Gareth Williams, San Jose State University and Laser Light Labs, Inc. At this special educational outreach meeting, Williams will lead us through 6 hands-on diode-laser-based activities designed to demonstrate optical science and technology. As usual, the meeting is open to the public, and we will be treating any attending science teacher with a teacher ID to a free pizza dinner! OSSD members: bring your local middle and high school science teachers!

Also at this meeting will be our annual San Diego Science Fair award presentations and annual OSSD elections. The science fair winners will be on hand with their projects before the meeting.

This workshop will show how a number of standard optics experiments can be performed safely using a laser diode, from surveying with the laser beam, through geometrical and physical optics, to diffraction gratings. The intent of the Laser Applications in Science Education (LASE) program is to make teachers comfortable with lasers from the start. There will be six stations set up, and attendees will move around in groups, spending 15 minutes at each station. There will be written instructions, and guidance will be provided by circulating advisors.

Speaker: Gareth Williams is a professor of physics at San Jose State University and the founder of Laser Light Lab, Inc. (www.laserlightlab.com). The company's intent is to bring laser-based optics education safely to high school science classrooms. The LASE program development began ten years ago under the sponsorship of the National Science Foundation. Lately, classes have been presented in association with the Exploratorium in San Francisco and The Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose. Classes at the Tech Museum were sponsored by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's "Laser Sciences and Optics in the Classroom" program for high school teachers.

June Meeting Review

San Diego Meeting Leaves Local Educators Beaming
by Jim Menders, Optical Society of San Diego

As part of a program which casts our 9 monthly meetings as a series of themed meetings, we focused on local educators in June. Thirty science teachers from all across San Diego county turned out for a diode laser workshop and a free pizza dinner. Sean Re, our host for the evening, (who recently traded optical engineering for teaching), was the ideal ambassador to the San Diego science teacher community. The workshop, entitled "LASE: Laser Applications in Science Education," consisted of a series of diode laser activity stations, at which participants operated laser diode based demonstrations. This evening's activities also neatly included our annual San Diego Science Fair awards for outstanding optics projects.

Taking advantage of the opportunity to speak directly to an audience of teachers, Sean used the meeting to advertise our optics outreach program to the teachers and an upcoming SPIE sponsored workshop for teachers in San Diego. Over the years, we have collected materials which we loan to teachers, including classroom-sized Optics Discovery Kits and a kit for presenting Douglas Goodman's "Optics Demonstrations Using an Overhead Projector." We frequently give workshops at our local annual Science Educators Conference to demonstrate these kits. This year's SPIE workshop, held in conjuction with their annual meeting here, featured Rico Tyler, leading the teachers through the construction of astronomical telescopes kitted mostly at Home Depot. (Patty Sweaney of the SPIE produced a fine workshop. Tyler was a great instructor and everyone took home a telescope capable of resolving the Rings of Saturn!)

Rhonda Mason, chairman of the Science Fair committee, presented our annual awards for the best optics projects of the Fair at this meeting. Our awards encourage not only students to take up optics, but also their teachers to teach optics. Each year we hand out cash prizes to 1st and 2nd place winners in the junior and senior division, and present HeNe lasers (donated by our longtime corporate sponsor, Melles Griot Laser Division) to their teachers. We hope that those thirty teachers in attendence will "go for the RED" (HeNe, that is) next time the science fair rolls around. This year's first place winners were Stephanie Tsai ("Photoelectrochemical Imaging on Single Crystal Silicon") and Laura Brees ("Food Colors, Are They Really One Color?") in the senior and junior divisions, respectively.

Junior Division Science Fair winner Laura Brees and her
jello spectrometer.(photo by M. Howland)

Our workshop was led by Gareth Williams, founder of Laser LightLab, Inc. (www.laserlightlab.com), and a Professor at San Jose State University. The workshop showed how a number of optical measurements could be performed safely using a laser diode. There were six stations set up, each equipped with keychain lasers for measuring the room height, the thickness of a plate of glass, the focal length of a lens, the track spacing on a CD and the speed of an optical chopper. In addition, a laser communications demonstration beamed audio across the room.

Gareth Williams shows teachers which end the light comes out.
(Photo by M. Howland)

By the end of the evening, the enthusiasm was evident: science fair optics prize winners vowed to return and teachers wanted to borrow the Discovery Kits. But, will their enthusiasm weather the endless San Diego summer?

Thanks to Gareth Williams, Martin Teachworth (San Diego Science Educators Association) for his mailing list and Western Graphics for mailing services. This article will appear in the fall issue of Focus, the OSA's newsletter for local sections of the Society.