March 2002
Annual Educational Outreach Meeting

"Ultraviolet Magic:
Teaching with Blacklights and UV Beads"

The Optical Society of San Diego and this evening's host, Sean Re, are pleased to present a workshop by Steve Pompea, the Optical Society of America's national workshop leader. At this special educational outreach meeting, Pompea will lead us through a hands-on exploration of fluorescence using blacklights and UV-sensitive beads. As usual, the meeting is open to the public, and we will be handing out FREE UV LAMPS and FREE PIZZA to any attending science teacher with a teacher ID. OSSD members: bring your local middle and high school science teachers!

We have seized the opportunity to have Steve Pompea with us this evening, who is in town to lead an optics workshop at the annual meeting of the National Science Teachers Association. The week long conference, to be held at the San Diego convention center is the largest meeting of science teachers in the world, drawing over 10,000 teachers. Our workshop is but one of three comprising the OSA-sponsored workshop entitled "Awesome Experiments in Light and Color" to be presented later that week. For information on the conference, see www.nsta.org.

Workshop: Fluorescent black lights with blue-blocking filters will be used to explore fluorescent phenomena. We will use blacklights which have become available on the surplus market for about $6. They are well built, incorporate a reflector and a blue blocking filter, making them ideal for fluorescence investigations. The detecting element will be ultraviolet sensitive beads that change color from white to red when exposed to UV-A and UV-B. The source and detector will be used to indicate the transmissivity of common materials such as saran wrap, glass (such as in eyeglasses), and plastic (such as optical plastic materials and polycarbonate used in glasses). The ultraviolet-sensitive beads can be used with sunlight as the source to check the blocking power of common sunscreens by measuring the time for the beads to change color. We will also explore the fluorescence of money, paper with brighteners, and tonic water.

Workshop Leader: Dr. Pompea specializes in stray light control and science education. He is an adjunct associate astronomer at Steward Observatory and manager of Science Education at the National Observatory, Tucson. He has chaired SPIE conferences on stray radiation, taught short course on spectrally selective surfaces, and wrote the chapter "Optical Black Surfaces" in the Handbook of Optics. In science education, he has consulted for many national curriculum and multimedia projects. Recently he has collaborated with UC Berkeley in developing teaching guides as part of the GEMS program.

March Meeting Review:

Fluorescence Workshop Gets Double Exposure
in San Diego

By Jim Menders
Optical Society of San Diego and MES Council Member

For years, the Society has held optics workshops for teachers as a part of our OSA Annual Meeting. Last year, after hearing about National Science Teacher Association's (NSTA) plans to hold their 2002 annual meeting of the meeting in San Diego it struck me: why not take the workshop to the teacher's annual meeting? To me, and others who advocate sharing optics with science teachers, the idea of holding a workshop at a gathering of 15,000 science teachers was dizzying. I proposed the workshop at the February 2001 meeting of the Member and Educational Services (MES) Council where the other members quickly embraced it. With the 49th National Convention of the NSTA (www.nsta.org) only a month away in St. Louis, our man on the street Vengu Lakshminarayanan, (MES council member and St. Louis resident) was able to attend and give us a first hand report. He found it to be lively week-long convention of ~20,000 science teachers at all levels. It was well organized, featuring lots of professional, corporate and government sponsors. Our workshop would fit right in. With the arrival last may of Jason Briggs, the new OSA staff member in charge of educational projects, the project got underway. Jason arranged the workshop, and booked OSA workshop leaders Steve Pompea and Mike Nofziger to present a series of three, hour long workshops at the meeting in late March 2002.

Steve Pompea is an Adjunct Associate Astronomer at Steward Observatory and Manager of Science Education at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (ttp://www.noao.edu).
Mike Nofziger is from the University of Arizona, Optical Science Center. (http://www.optics.arizona.edu/K-12_Outreach/default.htm)
Both Steve and Mike hail from Tucson, AZ and spend part of their professional lives promoting optics education.

From left to right, presenters Mike Nofziger and Steve Pompea, and co-hosts Sean Re and Jim Menders.
(photo by Kelly Cummings)

Each year, our local section in San Diego devotes one of our monthly meetings to a teacher outreach workshop. Aware that Steve and Mike were putting together a workshop for the NSTA meeting, we invited Steve and Mike to pre-present one of their workshops to local teachers before appearing at the NSTA meeting. They agreed to come to town a day early, and lead their fluorescence workshop the night before the NSTA date. Local physics teacher and section member Sean Re, the perfect ambassador to area science teachers, hosted the workshop at his high school. Close to thirty science teachers from all across San Diego County turned out for the workshop and a free pizza dinner. For desert, we handed out free UV lamps for the teachers to use and take back to their classrooms. The workshop, entitled "Ultraviolet Magic: Teaching with Blacklights" consisted of an exploration of the fluorescence of every day articles using UV-A emitting blacklights.

Steve Pompea leads teachers through the Fluorescence Workshop.
(photo by Kelly Cummings)

The lights, Steve told us, were originally manufactured by a cosmetic company to visualize imperfections in facial skin. They succeeded only too well! Now they were available at bargain basement prices. The blacklights turned up lots of surprises, like the fluorescent stripe along the edge of new currency, and the hidden dog hair attending the workshop on the clothes of one teacher. Less surprising, but impressive were the glow of a ruby ring and the blocking power of sunscreen.

We are convinced that optics belongs in the middle and high school science classes, and hope to encourage teachers by exposing them to exciting optics workshops. This year in San Diego, we managed a double exposure.